‘That Is Normal Biden’: But Was Press Conference Enough to Allay Fears?
President vows to remain in the race against Trump
Despite a few embarrassing gaffes, President Biden gave a generally strong performance during a nearly hour-long press conference Thursday, according to a variety of political commentators.
But the question remains: Will it be enough to quiet concerns from a number of Democrats who believe that Biden needs to step aside for reelection following his abysmal performance last month in the presidential debate against Donald Trump.
Biden took questions from reporters in Washington DC on a variety of topics in a press conference televised live on major networks, in what was largely seen as a high-stakes effort to quiet the opposition to him remaining at the head of the Democratic ticket in the November election.
Those questions about the president’s fitness to seek a second term blew up in the days and weeks following his halting and sometimes confused performance against Trump during their June 27 face-off.
Several Democratic politicians, as well as actor George Clooney — a major Democratic fundraiser — have publicly called on the president not to continue seeking reelection and turn the campaign over to another standard-bearer.
But Biden reiterated Thursday that he would remain in the race and could do the job, responding to pointed questions from reporters.
“I will just say, as you noted there, there were moments of startlingly impressive command of the issues,” MSNBC host Rachel Maddow said immediately after the press conference.
Biden did suffer a handful of embarrassing gaffes during the encounter with the press, such as referring to Vice President Kamala Harris as “Vice President Trump.”
Maddow’s MSNBC colleague, Joy Reid, mostly shrugged those off, however, noting that Biden’s mastery of foreign policy allowed for a “sort of mundane press conference,” even showing moments of passion such as speaking out against the large number of American children dying from gun violence.
“I think the gaffes and mixing up names, for people who have been observing Joe Biden for a long time, that is normal Biden,” she said.
The next morning, on Friday Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Eugene Robinson separately agreed that Biden has been making those same kinds of flubs for decades.
The issue is whether this press conference — or anything Biden could do at this point — would allow him to put this nagging issue to rest.
“The problem, of course, is that he is trying to unring the bell that was rung in the debate. And that is a very difficult task,” Robinson said, adding that polling in the presidential race shows Biden still tied — or behind — Trump, at this point.
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