After visiting with a number of Joe Biden’s campaign staffers, Amie Parnes, writing for The Hill, quoted one of them: “The only way he [Biden] wins is if he stays on offense. The second it goes the other way, things could go sideways.”
The Democrat Party’s presidential candidate has been prepping for weeks ahead of the first presidential debate scheduled for September 29. The strategy is simple, but not easy: Biden must go on offense and stay on offense. He’ll do that by challenging the president repeatedly over his alleged failures to contain the COVID virus, resulting in the deaths of more than 200,000 Americans.
“It’s all on you [Mr. President],” said another staffer. “The state of the economy, high unemployment, kids out of school, a pandemic that has gone unchecked. All of it is on you.”
Another staffer told Parnes that Biden “has a tendency to wrap up very well but he’s one of those people who takes some time to get there. He’s just not a guy who performs well in those initial moments. I think that’s something that makes us all a little nervous.”
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As a result, reported Parnes,
There is a palpable fear among some Democrats about whether Biden is up for the challenge, and whether being too aggressive could backfire.
They’ve cringed when Biden has given long-winded answers or trailed off without returning to his initial thought, and when he’s gone off message or said the wrong name or city.
A reputed former staffer intimately familiar with the situation inside the Biden campaign wrote anonymously on September 9 about his experience:
I worked as a low-level staffer for the Biden campaign’s HQ in Philly from July to the end of August. I am more of a Bernie guy, but I thought I should do whatever I could to defeat Trump, so I joined up. Eventually, I became so disgusted with what was going on, I had to leave.
He noted, “There are people whose job is to digitally de-age Biden for political ads. If you saw a recent speech for Joe and thought he looked like a mummy, then saw snippets of the same speech in an ad, you might have noticed he looked a lot better. That’s because they contracted VFX artists from California to de-age him. Normally I wouldn’t begrudge them this, as I’m sure all campaigns try to make their candidate look good.”
And then he made the main point:
Joe Biden is in the early stages of dementia, and is on medication for it.
This is the big one, and the one I have the least direct experience with, but it’s been an open secret for some time. Anyone who has had a relative with Alzheimer’s or dementia can tell you, there are good days and bad days.
On the good days, when Joe is at his most lucid, his campaign manager Jen will send him out for photo ops or TV interviews… make hay while the sun is shining, you know? On the bad days, Jen just tells the press pool “No Joe today,” and they’re all like, “Okay, cool!”
Most of the time, he’s just a little foggy and gets really agitated. But one of my co-workers told me that back in May there was a day where he thought he was running against Gary Hart in the ’84 primary again. Joe went under wraps for several days after that.
He’s been more lucid recently because his physician, Dr. O’Connor, put him on Namenda. Jen apparently was worried about someone finding it out, because she insisted that he prescribe it under a series of phony names, and then have the interns pick it up.
I bet there are a lot of pharmacists in Philly wondering why there are so many young people on Namenda.
Namenda is the trade name for Memantine, a medication used to treat moderate-to-severe Alzheimer’s disease. One of several side effects of the drug is sleepiness.
The former staffer explained why Biden didn’t take questions from the press following his announcement of Kamala Harris as his running mate:
The dementia medication has had, um… unfortunate side effects.
There’s no dancing around this … the medication has made Joe incontinent. Though his “good days” have increased dramatically, he can barely get through a press event without running to the bathroom.
That’s why he didn’t take questions after announcing Harris as his running mate. They weren’t afraid of the questions, the press loves him … they were afraid he was going to piss his pants on-camera.
Lately, Jen’s been having closed-door meetings to discuss which brand of incontinence pads would be best to purchase. Seriously, a group of paid staffers sat around and discussed which brands were the least visible, the least likely to leak, and wouldn’t audibly “crinkle.”
That’s when the anonymous staffer decided he’d had enough:
That’s around the time I left the campaign. I can’t be a party to this sick game anymore. I never really liked Joe Biden, but he deserves better than to be thrust into the public eye when he should be in memory care.
His wife should put a stop to this, but she’s way too excited about being “First Lady” to care about her ailing husband.
Even on a “good day,” Biden would have a tough time “taking it to the president.” Trump is a brawler and hasn’t backed down from a fight in recent memory. There’s every good reason why Biden staffers are nervous. A poor performance by their candidate on September 29 could, for all intents and purposes, end his run for the White House.
Photo: travellinglight / iStock / Getty Images Plus
An Ivy League graduate and former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at [email protected].
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