The Diplomatic Room, a charming room decorated in pastel tones on the ground floor of the White House, is usually used for the formal photographs that the president in office takes with his guests at Christmas parties and various celebrations.
Due to its smaller dimensions than the large rooms on the main floor, it was chosen on Thursday for Joe Biden to appear before the press after the devastating report by prosecutor Robert Hur, which exonerated him of having appropriated classified material, but cast doubt your memory capacity.
The idea was that, in a more secluded setting, where the president performs better than in front of crowds, he would demonstrate excellent mental abilities in front of the cameras.
The result was the opposite: his several gaffes during the session fueled the controversy over whether he is fit to run for a second term.
The White House and its Democratic supporters have come out en masse to defend the president, who in that intervention confused Egypt with Mexico and stopped short when describing the rosary of his deceased son, Beau Biden.
“No one who works here can agree [with Hur's report].
“We all see a person who works very, very hard, who perfectly understands how Americans feel and how to respond to the issues that matter to them,” said her spokesperson, Karine Jean-Pierre, at her daily press conference on Friday. .
The fear is that an image of Biden will consolidate as that “well-intentioned old man with a bad memory” described in the prosecutor's report, which they argue is a caricature very distant from what they perceive on a daily basis.
“Biden's age represents his main impediment to re-election and this description can be very damaging,” Dan Pfeiffer, former political advisor in the White House during the era of Barack Obama and Biden's vice presidency, acknowledges on his blog.
Hur's report has added fuel to a debate that has been quietly discussed in some circles for some time: the president's suitability to run for re-election.
Photos, videos and memes abound on social networks that portray his rigid walks and his blunders.
Polls give him the lowest levels of popularity for an American president in recent times, and place him behind his foreseeable Republican rival, Donald Trump, ahead of the November elections.
A poll for
The New York Times
last November indicated that 70% of voters in swing states agreed that Biden “is too old to be an effective president.”
Only half thought the same about the Republican candidate, Donald Trump, four years his junior and who has also confused names and events in public.
The achievements of his mandate
But the Democratic Party hierarchy remains steadfast in its support of Biden, a man for whom public speaking has always been difficult — he stuttered as a child — and who has been prone to minor speaking gaffes throughout his career. policy.
His supporters point to the achievements of a mandate that has relaunched the US economy and left unemployment at the lowest levels in half a century, and that abroad has normalized relations with allies after the shocks of the Trump era.
They remember that in 2019 and 2020 a similar debate was already raised about the age, and popularity, of the then former vice president.
That his first results in the primaries were disappointing.
That he ended up clearly prevailing in them, and in the 2020 presidential elections. And that in each of the primaries that have been held so far this year, Biden has obtained resounding victories.
The president has also shown no signs of considering resigning from the candidacy, convinced that he is the ideal person to defeat Trump again in November.
On Thursday, when a journalist asked him about voters' concerns about his age, he angrily insisted that "that's his opinion."
In modern times, neither of the two major parties in the United States has attempted to replace their candidate.
In 2016, the then Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, fainted while she was attending a ceremony commemorating the attacks of September 11, 2001, something that made Donna Brazile, the then acting chair of the Democratic National Committee, consider the possibility. .
But Brazile quickly abandoned the idea, she has written in her memoir.
Something similar happened in the Republican camp that year, when a conversation was leaked in which Trump recommended grabbing women “by the pussy,” but party president Reince Preibus then declared that “there is no mechanism for that.” .
Democratic convention
If he changes his mind, Biden could suggest a replacement at the Democratic convention, the party's big meeting in August that will formalize the appointment of its representative in the presidential elections.
The formation's rules stipulate that the delegates who vote in that forum are “entrusted,” but not “committed,” to a candidate, and must represent “in good faith” the opinions of those who appointed them.
The precedents for a direct appointment at a convention are not many, nor recent.
The last one dates back to 1968, when Lyndon Johnson resigned from seeking re-election.
After the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the favorite of Democratic voters, Hubert Humphrey, the vice president, was named at the party convention in Chicago - the city that will also host this electoral conclave this year - in a few days surrounded by chaos.
Humphrey suffered a resounding defeat against Republican Richard Nixon.
One of the problems that the party would face, if that situation were to arise, would be who could replace Biden, who is running in the primaries almost unopposed.
His vice president, Kamala Harris, has never finished taking off in popularity polls.
Of other possibilities, such as the governors of California, Gavin Newsom, or of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, very loyal to the president, it is considered that they prefer to reserve their options for the 2028 elections.
For now, Biden's supporters plan to continue their firm defense of the president.
And, perhaps, that the tenant of the White House appears more before the public, as an editorial in
The New York Times
demands this Saturday : “The president has to reassure and create trust among the public by doing things that until now he has not been willing to do convincingly.”
“He has to go out and campaign more, in unscripted contacts with voters.
He may hold more question-and-answer sessions with voters in communities or on television.
He should hold press conferences regularly,” he adds.
Meanwhile, his Republican rival, Trump, has chosen to remain silent on the age debate, to focus on the key issue in Hur's report, Biden's exoneration of classified documents in his possession after leaving the vice presidency.
The former president, who faces 41 charges for voluntarily retaining much more material, has limited himself to indicating that if prosecutors have exonerated the current tenant of the White House, "they should not file charges against me either."
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