New York Times columnist David Brooks urged former President Joe Biden not to fight an “old battle” during a conversation on Friday after Biden returned to the public eye this week.
Brooks told PBS NewsHour that if Joe Biden ever called him to ask what he should do with his post-presidency, he would tell the former president to “be post-political, rise above it and don’t get back in, don’t try to fight old battle.”
Biden spoke to BBC and “The View” this week after the 2024 election, blaming former Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss on sexism and racism. He also answered questions about his alleged cognitive decline and maintained that he could have beaten Trump.
PBS NewsHour host Geoff Bennett also asked Brooks if there was any strategic value in saying that he would have beaten the sitting president following his former VP’s failed attempt.
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“You know, I think he’s empirically wrong about that. Kamala Harris ran about as good a campaign as she could. She was saddled with the Biden legacy, an unpopular presidency. Biden would have been saddled by that legacy in addition to his age. So, you take those two factors, it’s hard to see how he wins,” Brooks said.
During the interview, the former president pushed back on criticism that Harris didn’t have enough time to run an effective campaign, alleging that she had six months to do so. The former vice president had around 90 days.
“But, he’s a proud man with a chip on his shoulder who feels himself under attack, frankly, in the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, and so he wants to stand up for himself,” he continued.
The New York Times columnist also suggested Biden should avoid the partisan mud.
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“I would only counsel him as someone who’s a longtime admirer of Joe Biden, is that what we want from our presidents is not more politics. What we want from our presidents is somebody who’s post-politics, who can speak to us from a higher level, not in the partisan mud. And Jimmy Carter did that. I think George W. Bush has done that through his painting,” he said.
When pressed by “The View” co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin on several allegations of cognitive decline in multiple new books on the 2024 election, Biden and his wife, former first lady Jill Biden, fired back.
“They are wrong,” he said. “There’s nothing to sustain that, number one. Number two, you know, think of what we left with. We left with a circumstance where we had an insurrection when I started, not since the Civil War. We had a circumstance where we were in a position that we — well, the pandemic, because of the incompetence of the last outfit, end up over a million people dying, a million people dying. And we’re also in a situation where we found ourselves unable to deal with a lot of just basic issues, which I won’t go into in the interest of time. And so we went to work, and we got it done and, you know, one of the things that — well, I’m—”
The former first lady then jumped in and said, “one of the things I think is that the people who wrote those books were not in the White House with us.”
“And they didn’t see how hard Joe worked every single day. I mean, he’d get up. He’d put in a full day, and then at night he would — I’d be in bed, you know, reading my book, and he was still on the phone, reading his briefings. Working with staff. I mean, it was nonstop,” Jill Biden said.
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