This is one of those things that Republicans do that they just want to apply to Democrats. Like when someone had to tell Trump how to react to Charlottesville or January 6th because his off the cuff initial thoughts were so horrible. At least with Biden there is a general consistency between his off the cuff comments and his prepared remarks, maybe just with a difference due to his stutter.
I despised Bush the younger, but this was the one point where I stood up for him. The press jumped all over completely irrelevant verbal ticks of his.
You must be too young to remember Reagan’s progressing dementia, or Ford’s “falling down problem” or Wilson’s stroke, or…
I truly hope it isn’t serious.
Biden fell 3 times while boarding Air Force One
Well I tell you what, if you have a problem figuring out that his off-the-cuff remarks are consistent, then you ain’t black.
Funny they don’t just have a gate like in a big airport
Eh, Taft weighed about a thousand pounds, and we’ve had a president who needed a wheel chair. And hell, Trump stumbled bringing a glass of water to his mouth. This doesn’t seem like a big deal to me.
I hope you’re right, but none of your examples were of 78 year old men.
That is true, I don’t remember. But at the time I did talk to some people who did. Their agreement was that there was still nothing quite like “he’s just in over his head.”
Incidentally, isn’t it ironic that Ford, criticized for being clumsy, was maybe our most athletic president (although bush 1 was too.) I think he played football for michigan? don’t have time to look it up.
Not sure what you’re getting at here.
Biden is the first 78-yo to get elected, to get inaugurated, to sign an executive order, to address the nation, to fly as POTUS on Air Force One, etc. etc.
The American people elected a 78 year old man to be POTUS: they didn’t see his age as an impediment to serving in that office.
That sounds right (I’m also too lazy to look it up)
The ‘joke’ was that he had played too much football without a helmet.
Or they saw him as the lesser of two evils.
That wasn’t an understood risk at the time. Although in retrospect, I wonder if there might have been anything to it. It was a joke that he was clumsy, which was sort of bizarre, since he’d been a successful athlete.
You realize that we have a VP, and a lot of other cabinet members who have now been sworn in. I hope Biden has a long, successful presidency, but if he trips on the airplane and falls to his death tomorrow, we don’t have a constitutional crisis or anything.
I’m not sure what you mean. I wasn’t implying we have a constitutional crisis if Biden dies. I’m saying that maybe people elected him not because they liked him, but because they disliked him less.
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From wiki, Gerald Ford - Wikipedia :
From Lyndon B Johnson, while LBJ was POTUS & Ford was a US Rep:
(Quote by Lyndon B. Johnson: “He’s [Gerald Ford] a nice guy but he played too...”)
Yes, I agree that’s a big part of how he got elected (and it’s a big part of many POTUS elections given our 2 party system), but he wouldn’t have been on the ticket at all if primary voters didn’t see him as fit to serve.
I think that’s mostly been true for every president since Adams.
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Not even close to accurate. I can name MANY immediate examples otherwise, and you probably can, too.