Even President Joe Biden’s staff knows he is too old to campaign and govern with the same efficiency as a younger leader, as they try to address his age problem as the 80-year-old runs for a second term.
Jonathan Martin from politics wrote a column on Monday about some advice the president’s Democratic allies shared with him after the party collectively panicked over polls showing former President Donald Trump — the Republican Party frontrunner — leading Biden in five of six swing states.
One of Biden’s main problems, sources say, is that he is denying “his ability to do the job” despite turning 81 next week.
“When he first took the oath of office, the oldest president in history, Biden will not be able to govern and campaign in the manner of previous incumbents,” Martin wrote. “He simply doesn’t have the capacity to do it, and his staff doesn’t trust him to even try, as they make clear by banning him from the press.”
The president will occasionally take questions from the press, but he rarely sits down for interviews, holds few news conferences and has never appeared on stage in the White House briefing room.
Democrats told Politico President Joe Biden is denying ‘his ability to do the job’ as he runs for re-election as the oldest president in US history
Aides surround President Joe Biden in the Oval Office. Politico’s Jonathan Martin’s column said that “his staff doesn’t trust him to even try” and is running a traditional campaign, “as they make clear by blocking him from the press.”
Biden will instead have to run a so-called “Rose Garden” campaign — an “adjustment to that unavoidable fact of life” that he has lost a step.
That term comes from current President Jimmy Carter in 1976, when he challenged Republican incumbent President Gerald Ford.
Carter complained that Ford was using White House events to deliver his campaign’s message, rather than headlining rallies and more traditional campaign events, which is often a grueling practice.
During the 2020 race, Biden was spared a tough campaign schedule due to the COVID-19 pandemic and his adherence to social distancing practices.
This time, Democrats are urging him to be creative.
First, he needs to put many younger Democrats in his place.
“The governors, the senators, the cabinet secretaries and the infrastructure czar should be the faces of Biden’s campaign, along with the president and vice president,” the Democrats he spoke to told Politico. “The message: With the Democrats staying in power, not only is an 82-year-old at the helm, but so is this group – Team Normal compared to Trump and his second Star Wars bar.”
First lady Jill Biden (left) and President Joe Biden (right) shake hands on the South Lawn. A number of Democrats shared their advice with Politico on how he can deal with the age issue as he turns 81 next week.
Biden’s team and the Democratic National Committee began doing this by sending surrogates to the Republican debates.
At the first debate in Milwaukee, Cedric Richmond, a White House congressman, White House official and DNC adviser, was on hand to provide counterprogramming.
At the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, 56-year-old California Governor Gavin Newsom played the Biden campaign spokesman and even appeared on Fox News, opposite Sean Hannity.
And last week, 58-year-old Illinois Governor JB Pritzker spoke on behalf of the party in Miami.
The allies Politico spoke to pointed to the representation in the debate, but said, “That’s not nearly enough.”
And while Trump is known to continue holding back-to-back rallies — he headlined 14 rallies in the final three days of his 2020 campaign — rather than match that, Democrats urged Biden to get creative to deal with the locations where he meets voters.
They advised Biden’s staff to place the president in “an environment that plays to his strengths,” adding that while that may be “risky,” it is “more likely to undermine his decency than his weaknesses.”
‘A casino walk and a conversation with the (strongly Spanish) culinary union in Las Vegas; a town hall with Arab-Americans in Dearborn, Michigan; an HBCU football tailgate (think Georgia),” they suggested.