Biden Audio Release Pressures Democrats who would rather talk about Trump | News, sports, jobs

File – President Joe Biden, left, to President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy, speaks during an event about Ukraine Compact on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Washington, Thursday, July 11, 2024. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File))

By Jonathan J. Cooper Associated Press

Phoenix (AP) – Joe Biden's time in the public office is now behind him, but his age and his intellectual sharpness have become a litmus test for the next leaders in his party.

Audio was published on Friday from parts of the interviews that Biden gave to the federal prosecutor in 2023, the youngest in a stream of reports that asked bidens health again in the spotlight. Months after the former Vice President Kamala Harris lost to President Donald Trump, a new book claims that the White House covered the physical and intellectual settlement of the White House.

In the past few days, several potential democratic competitors for nomination have been asked in 2028 whether they believe that bidges have decreased in office or whether he should have requested a re -election before a catastrophic debate led to his retreat.

Many Democrats would prefer to concentrate on Trump's second term. Trump did his best to prevent this – according to an NBC news analysis on average six times a day in his first 100 days in office in office in office – and the Republicans pursued his leadership, whereby the voters who were frustrated by Trump's political steps will still be preferred from memories of unpopular presidency.

In the race for the governor of Virginia, one of the best profiled competitions of this year, the Republican Winsome Earle-Sears leads a few digital ads that hugged the democratic Abigail Spanberger with the pictures of the two, and the former president calls them a friend.

“Joe Biden's stench is still in the Democratic Party,” said Sawyer Hackett, Democratic strategy Sawyer Hackett. “We have to do the hard work to fix it, and I think that also belongs that it is honestly the truth says when we were wrong.”

The democratic Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut said politico this week that “there is no doubt” that bidges, now 82, experienced a cognitive decline as president.

Pete Buttigieg, the former transport secretary, was not nearly so blunt, but still stopped defending Biden's decision to run. He replied “maybe” when he was asked on Tuesday whether the Democratic Party would be better off if Biden hadn't tried to run a second term.

“At the moment, afterwards, most people would agree that this is the case,” said Buttigieg reporters during a stop in Iowa.

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker said that in his meeting with bidges he saw no signs of a mental or physical decline.

“I saw him a few times,” he said to CNN this week. “I definitely went to the White House when I had an opportunity to fight for something for people in my state. And I never had the experience of something else than a man who brought many good ideas to solve problems.”

The book “Original Sin” by journalist Jake Tapper from CNN and Alex Thompson from Axios is burdening a core controversy about Bidens Presidency: Despite the voters, including the Democrats, for a second term of office, and the survey points should not be communicated that he should not run again. Biden would have been 86 at the end of a second term if he had won in November.

A spokesman for Biden did not respond to a request for comments.

“We continue to expect everything that shows where Joe Biden had to make a presidential decision or where national security was threatened or where he could not do his job,” said the spokesman for many media in response to the book.

On Friday, Axios published parts from Audio recordings of Bidens six hours of interviews with prosecutors who examined his treatment of classified documents as Vice President in 2017 after his term.

The bid administration had already published transcripts of the interviews, but the records illuminated the special consultant Robert Hurs characterization of bids as “likeable, well-intentioned, older man with a bad memory” and seemed to confirm his claim that the then president fought to remember what the year of the year in which his son Beau Beau Beau Beau Beau Beau is in 2015 Cancer had died.

Biden and his adjutants aggressively shot back against Hur's report, which they described as partisans. At that time – in early 2024 – Biden was still going to run for a second term and to ward off the allegations that he was too old for another four years.

The recordings published by Axios include Biden's discussion about the death of his son. His answers to some questions from the prosecutors are interrupted by long breaks, and his lawyers sometimes came to help him remember data and schedules.

Before he dropped his re -election offer last summer, Biden stood widespread in his own party, even as a democratic guide, both a number of verbal flub and republican accusations of his declining sharpness.

In January 2022, an AP-NORC center for public affairs only resulted in a year after Biden's first survey by AP-NORC that only 48% of the Democrats wanted it to apply for a re-election. This fell back 37% of Democrats in an AP-NORC survey carried out in February 2023. In August 2023, three quarters of the American and 69% of the Democrats explained that they believed that bidges were too old to act as president for a further term of four years.

And shortly after his debate flop, almost two thirds of the Democrats said that biden was supposed to withdraw from the race.

Biden and the former First Lady Jill Biden appeared in ABC's “The View” in a preventive defense of his health and decision -making before the first extracts of “original sin” were published.

He said he was responsible for Trump's victory, but had at least partially attributed Harris' loss to sexism and racism. He claimed that he had won if he had remained the democratic candidate. Both biodes rejected concerns about his cognitive decline.

Patricia Mcenerney, a 74-year-old democrat in Goodyear, Arizona, said Biden shouldn't have tried again.

“I find it sad how it ended,” she said.

She compared him to Douglas Macarthur, the Second World War and the Korean War General, who was known to President Harry Truman.

“I think he has to stop giving interviews. I think that would help,” said Mcenerney. “As Macarthur said, generals simply fade.”

Janet Stumps, a 66-year-old Democrat also from Goodyear, a suburb of Phoenix, had a different view.

“I don't think it will hurt the Democrats,” said Stumpfe. “I am bad that he has the feeling of defending himself. I don't think he has to do it. Every age. And the fact that he did what he did at his age, I think he should be praised for it.”

Hackett, the democratic strategist, predicted that bidges will be an important factor in the advantages of 2026 or 2028 in the primary elections of 2026 or 2028. But he said, Democrats who want the voters to trust them would be well served, “if they say the truth about the mistakes that our party made in advance by 2024”.

“Most of these mistakes were driven by Joe Biden, and I think every democrat who is not willing to say that this is not really willing to face the voters who want the truth and want authenticity,” said Hackett.

Rick Wilson, a former GOP strategist who co-founded the anti-Trump group The Lincoln Project, said that the Republicans want to talk about bidges to avoid the defense of Trump. But he said the strategy was foolishness.

In addition to “political nerds,” he said, “nobody cares about it.”

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This story was corrected to reflect that Kamala Harris is a former vice president, no former president.

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The author of Associated Press, Thomas Beaumont, contributed to this report by Cedar Rapids, Iowa.