Count U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine among the Democratic Party elites who want us to believe that we didn’t see what we saw out of Joe Biden in the CNN debate last week.
“It’s the pundits, it’s the editorial writers,” Kaine said during a campaign stop in Petersburg on Monday, responding to a request from the city’s vice mayor, Darrin Hill, to push his Democratic colleagues to “turn down the noise” about calling for Biden to withdraw from the race.
Biden, 81, was at times frighteningly incoherent in last week’s debate with ex-president Donald Trump, ending one answer with a non-sequitur claim that “we finally beat Medicare,” and injecting a self-own on border security into an answer to a question on women’s reproductive rights.
The dreadful performance seemed to confirm doubts that have lingered about Biden’s competence that have lingered since the 2020 campaign, and have deepened as U.S. and foreign officials who have interacted with him in private settings have noted a noticeable cognitive decline in the past year.
White House and Biden campaign officials have come under fire from all sides since the debate, facing not only the calls from far and wide that Biden drop out of the campaign, but also internal pressure from Biden’s family and close friends about the lack of preparation that was obvious on the debate stage.
It’s against that backdrop that Kaine made the claim on Monday that all of this is media-generated. On Tuesday, things started to get a little more real, with the first sitting Democratic congressman, Lloyd Doggett of Texas, going public with his thoughts that Biden should step down.
“I represent the heart of a congressional district once represented by Lyndon Johnson. Under very different circumstances, he made the painful decision to withdraw. President Biden should do the same,” Doggett said.
Kaine, who is facing a re-election challenge from Republican Hung Cao in November, would seem to have backed himself into a political corner with his stance on Biden, who 72 percent of voters do not believe has the “mental and cognitive health to be president,” according to a CBS News/You Gov poll released on Monday.
At a second campaign stop on Monday, Kaine, asked by a constituent in Charles City what he thinks Biden should do now after the debate, went all-in.
“The campaign’s going to do what the campaign’s going to do, but I think, more settings where the president is interacting with everyday people and demonstrating that, that’s his super power,” Kaine said, adding later: “President Biden, where he shines, is not at a rally with 100,000 people and it’s not on the debate stage. Where he shines is in a town hall meeting with regular people where he can really interact with them. That’s his superpowers, his empathy and his communication skills with everyday people.”
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Chris Graham
