Biden’s halting and sometimes befuddled performance in last week’s debate has fanned concerns about his age and sparked criticism from donors,voters and some Democrats.
US President Joe Biden is resisting calls to step down but his performance has triggered anxiety within his own party.
While some critics have pointed fingers at Biden aides who prepared him for the debate,others includingTheNew York Times’editorial board said Biden should step aside as the Democratic Party candidate against Donald Trump in the November 5 election. Biden and top Democrats say he has no plans to do so and intends to beat Trump.
Bernstein,the formerWashington Postinvestigative reporter who rose to fame for his reporting on the Watergate scandal that eventually led to the resignation of Richard Nixon,says sources close to Biden have told him the president’s debate behaviour was not a rarity.
“These are people,several of them who are very close to President Biden who love him,have supported him and among them are some people who have raised a lot of money for him,and they are adamant that what we saw the other night,the Joe Biden we saw,is not a one-off,that there have been 15 to 20 occasions in the last year-and-a-half when the president has appeared somewhat as he did in that horror show that we witnessed,” Bernstein told CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
“And what’s so significant is the people that this is coming from,and also how many people around the president are aware of such incidents,including some reporters incidentally who have witnessed some of them.”
Bernstein,who did not disclose who he had spoken with,said that “particularly there has been a marked incidence of cognitive decline and physical infirmity”.
He said many of those who have witnessed the behaviour had approached Biden’s former chief of staff,Ron Klain,to tell him “we have a problem”,but they have been “pushed back repeatedly”.
“There was a fundraiser,which he started at the podium,and then he became very stiff,according to the people there,as if it were almost a kind of rigor mortis,” he told CNN. “This was a year ago,almost exactly,at the old Four Seasons restaurant on Park Avenue. And he became very stiff and a chair had to be brought for him to do the latter part of the event.”
Biden’s re-election team has spent the past two days holding difficult phone calls with hundreds of top Democratic donors in a bid to tamp down panic and respond to those questioning if the 81-year-old should stay in the race.
with Reuters
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