Politico’s Eli Stokols: ‘Shifting Explanations’ from the W.H. on Biden’s Health Are Not Reassuring to People

GEIST: “Fill us in a little bit more, Eli, on what you’re hearing.”
STOKOLS: “Thanks, Willie. Well, we talked to more than two dozen people who are close to this administration, close to the senior staff. And you know, it’s understandable after a debate performance like that, that there would be a lot of frustration and finger pointing. And a lot of that has been directed at the five or six of very senior aides, people who’ve been with the president a long time, who — a lot of people throughout the party now are sort of blaming for them being in this predicament, for cloistering the president, sort of trying their best to manage the age situation, to mitigate coverage of that by the media, to really attack coverage of that by the media, and more than anything, to come up with this Rationale that he has to run for a second term. One person told us that, you know, that was a conversation that just never expanded beyond the the senior group, all of whom would benefit by the president getting another four years in the Oval Office. And that this senior team has been sort of resistant to bringing in other opinions to changing course. I mean, there’s a lot of frustrations, not just about the debate, the decision to do it, how the president was prepped, but also just, you know, with how the president has not been able to lift his numbers. They look at the people who’ve been running this campaign for over a year from Delaware, some from within the White House unofficially, and they say — you know, these people have not moved the numbers, Joe Biden has not addressed his deficit, on Thursday night last week, he made things a lot worse. And that is largely because you got the same people cutting the ads, the same people figuring out how they’re going to deploy the president, and the same principle, who, you know, despite their very up close knowledge, and seeing the president every day and — and realizing his limitations, you know, they came up with this Rationale for him to run anyway, that he’s the only person who’s ever beaten Donald Trump, and thus he has to be the candidate again. And I think now the view across the party, at least among a lot of the people that we talked to, is that that seems to be a pretty self-serving, and maybe delusional case for another four years.”
GEIST: “And Eli, the argument we heard last night from President Biden that he had been traveling in Europe, that’s true, nut as I pointed out, he’d been home for 11 days and been resting at Camp David for a week by the time that debate took place, which kind of reinforces the point, does it not that he needed 11 days to rest before it debate and still perform that way? Is that the argument that they’re going to go with for his performance on Thursday?”
STOKOLS: “Well, they keep kind of adjusting the argument, which is a tell in and of itself. I mean, at first, it was just a bad night, and now it’s ‘Oh, I was traveling 11 days before the debate.’ You know, those were grueling trips, going from Italy to Los Angeles overnight, doing the fundraiser after two trips to Europe. That is a lot to do right before the debate. Some people were nervous about that ahead of time. But you know, the — the — the discrepancies here, that — that sort of changing picture, None of this is reassuring. Democrats are really concerned at this point about the sustainability of Biden’s candidacy. The shifting explanations, not reassuring to people. And even though this is obviously damage control, this is an effort meant to sort of keep the trains on track here in a very difficult moment, it’s also a huge shift for this White House that for three and a half years up until this point, insisted that nothing was wrong. And even the suggestion that the president had aged or lost a step which now the White House is being explicit about to explain away the debate, for three and a half years that suggestion was dismissed out of hand, reporters were — were — were attacked for — for writing it and suggesting that the things that were in plain sight about the president being very slow say to get into his motorcade you know, not taking the — the big steps down from the main door of Air Force One, using the lower steps because there are fewer steps to climb, you know all those things, there was just so much frustration and — and defensiveness and — and dismissiveness about those stories from the White House. And now suddenly, they’re here acknowledging the obvious, which is that yes, the president has lost a step. He’s not quite how he was even four years ago.”