President Biden's allies are fuming that recent press coverage of his cognitive ability has been so overwhelmingly negative, especially after Special Counsel Robert Hur's report was released, per recent reporting.
Hur's report, which included anecdotes about Biden not remembering the date that his son Beau died, have set off a slew of stories about Biden's mental ability.
"You feel you have got to write about age, because everybody else is writing about age," Biden's former Senate chief of staff Ted Kaufman, who is 84, told Politico in a report on Wednesday.
"But in normal times, the press would be looking at which of these two people is most qualified — in terms of their knowledge, in terms of their character, in terms of their personal morals — to be president of the United States. That’s what they’ve done for 200 years. Why are we not doing that now?" Kaufman asked.
"This drives me crazy," Kaufman said when asked by Politico about the barrage of media stories about Biden's age in advance of the election. "Here we are, a presidential race with seven months to go, and the major issue to the press is age … Which one is in better shape?" he asked, comparing Biden to former President Trump. "Which one’s riding bikes, and which one’s telling Russia to invade NATO? It goes back to Hillary and emails. What has to do with what’s going on in my life?"
"I don’t think the media has yet reconciled its own coverage now with its past coverage," Biden's special climate envoy John Kerry said.
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"Because if you go back to when Joe Biden was chosen as VP in 2008, I remember the press was obsessed with this idea of gaffes," Kerry continued. "They hung on every word. There was a whole lot of writing about this back when Biden was in his early 60s. And by the way, none of it stopped him from being a very successful vice president. Now suddenly that he’s 80, everyone’s writing furiously as if this must automatically be about age when their own body of writing proves otherwise. So people might want to dig a little deeper and challenge their own narratives."
The Politico report included a story from Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who said that an expert from the Federal Rail Administration was unable to answer Biden's "detailed questions."
"He was asking such detailed questions that we actually had to dial in another expert from Amtrak to get to some of the things he was asking about," Buttigieg said.
Former Rep. Lee Hamilton, who is 92, told Politico that Biden has definitely aged since he first met him.
"Look, I’d prefer he would be 20 to 30 years younger, but he’s not," Hamilton said. "We don’t get what we’d like, we get what we have in front of us. The choice is him or the other guy — Trump — and I’m not on his side, of course."
"We take things as they are," Hamilton said, "not as we would like them to be."
Biden will turn 82 in November, while Trump will turn 78 in June.
