Before Joe Biden dropped out, his campaign team had a devil of a time trying to find footage from campaign events they could use that would demonstrate Biden's ability to go "off script" and communicate with voters.
According to the book "Original Sin" by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, at one point, the campaign decided to stage a town hall with handpicked audience members and staffers. Biden was given the questions in advance, supposedly ensuring he would provide the kind of answers that would make for footage showing him in charge of his faculties and with a firm grasp of the facts.
It was a failure. According to "Original Sin," the event "went so poorly" that "people in the campaign determined the town hall yielded unusable material."
The event was closed to the press. Only his most fervent supporters were present and asking questions Biden knew were coming. “Biden had trouble. The campaign ultimately decided that the footage wasn’t usable," according to one of Tapper/Alexander's sources on the campaign.
The Biden apologists who worked on the campaign are pushing back. They gave the writers three highly edited versions of the ad that still showed Biden sleepwalking through the town hall.
Tapper and Alexander wondered why the ads with the footage from the fake town hall never aired if they didn't show Biden's infirmities.
A Biden spokesperson tells POLITICO that the campaign tested the ads with focus groups but did not deploy them before the president dropped out of the race following his disastrous June 2024 debate.
Asked about the Biden advisers’ claims, Tapper disputed the contention. In a quotation supplied to POLITICO by Tapper, an unnamed Biden adviser said: “While the campaign was able to selectively utilize portions of the footage to craft ads that were eventually tested on focus groups, the consensus from senior and mid level campaign staff present for the event and those privy to the editing process was that the footage was not up to par and would require crafty editorial support. The campaign’s leadership would not have needed to wait nearly four months to (not) release the ads created with the footage if it reflected the picture of confidence they suggest.”
POLITICO has been unable to independently verify the identity of the unnamed Biden adviser supplied by Tapper.
Another now-famous anecdote is Biden's failure to recognize George Clooney at a fundraising event in June 2024. Clooney wrote an op-ed a couple of weeks later urging Biden to withdraw. Many speculate that when Biden forgot who he was at that moment, it convinced Clooney that Biden had to go.
Thompson reports that some people say ads from the town hall weren’t used because the lighting was bad; the lighting looks serviceable in the ads. Others told Thompson that Biden’s performance at the event was poor; Biden, indeed, sounds raspy and old.
In a statement to POLITICO, a spokesperson for Tapper and Thompson said: “Jake and Alex stand by their reporting in ‘Original Sin.’ The Biden team is repeating the same obfuscatory tactics used during their time in the White House, and news outlets continuing to rely on the very same unattributed and unverified voices raises serious credibility questions.”
Joe Biden was incapable of running for a second term. One of the focuses of Rep. James Comer's investigation into the whole affair needs to be who was responsible for giving the go-ahead for Biden to continue. It won't surprise me a bit if it turns out to be his wife, Jill.
She had to know she wasn't protecting her husband. That means she was exploiting him. For what purpose is anyone's guess.
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