NBC national affairs analyst John Heilemann on Friday said President Joe Biden’s campaign’s largest concern is that persuading certain voters the president is competent may be a lost cause.
Biden’s cognitive capabilities have repeatedly been raised as a possible problem, with NBC political analyst Elise Jordan earlier on Friday saying voters tell her they will be tuning into the upcoming presidential debate to “make sure that he’s up to the task” of being president. Heilemann on “Morning Joe” said the campaign’s deepest fear is that there may be no solution to persuading voters who have “stubborn concerns about” the president, based in part on an interview he conducted with Biden campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon. (RELATED: ‘Great News’: Sean Hannity Says Biden’s Debate Rules ‘Extraordinarily Favorable’ For Trump)
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NBC Analyst Says Biden Campaign’s Biggest ‘Worry’ Is It May Be Impossible To Convince Voters He’s Competent pic.twitter.com/iqlIRCGUNv
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“I think that the thing, Katty, that worries them, is that the information environment is what it is,” Heilemann told MSNBC contributor Katty Kay. “And so I asked [O’Malley Dillon] to kind of try to make the case for, you know we see surrogates all the time go on TV and say, ‘I was in a meeting with Joe Biden recently and he seemed great.’ And I said, ‘Look, most of those people have been at one meeting with Joe Biden or a couple. You spend more time with him or as much time with him as anybody in the White House over the course of the last three years. How do you make the case that Biden is, give me a vivid reason to believe that for those who say Joe Biden is not up to the job?'”
“And she told a great story … emotional, powerful, vivid, but it’s a four or five-minute long story,” he added. “And in this information environment … the voters they have to reach are people who don’t hear the five-minute story. They’re never going to see Joe Biden that way. What they’re going to see is deep fakes, cheap fakes and not fakes, but images, quick images that leave a certain impression. And trying to reach people in this environment is really hard, reach anyone in the environment we live in now in the information ecosystem.”
Former President Barack Obama on Saturday seemed to guide Biden off a stage during a campaign event where he appeared to freeze. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Monday endeavored to downplay worries about Biden appearing to wander off at the latest G7 Summit, calling it a “cheap fake” orchestrated by Republicans following a video of it circulating recently.
“And I think they are grappling with that, a small set of voters that are very hard to reach with some very significant, stubborn concerns about Biden,” the analyst said. “How do you get through to those people? How do you move the needle with those people? There is no answer. There’s no secret silver bullet answer to that question. And that’s, I think, the thing, Katty, I think they worry about more than anything else.”
Back-to-back listeners on Tuesday called into popular hip-hop radio show, “The Breakfast Club,” to attack the president, as well as Democrats who assert he is fine.
The first caller dubbed Biden “demented Joe,” and the second said “these Democrats keep wanting to tell us not to believe our lying eyes, like everybody can’t see Joe Biden.”
“He is 81. And God bless him, but that don’t mean you capable and you the only person to run this country. We see what’s going on,” the second caller continued. “You can tell us this is not happening … but we see it. We actually out here living it. I’m actually seeing people having to put their groceries back at the cash register. People barely can afford energy bills now.”
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