Alternatively, Obama has but one endorsement to give for his country and if he gives it now, 1) He might give it to someone who ends up not getting the nomination, and B) giving it to someone during the primaries would be seen as attempting to significantly influence the outcome. Just bad form all around. It is unfortunate that some people like to malinterpret that sort of restraint to suit their own agenda.
I don’t think Biden has dementia. He looks like the crypt keeper on the old tv show Tales From the Crypt. But he has always fumbled with his words.
It is unfortunate that society has a belief that in order to be intelligent you must be a polished speaker. In my business I know that such a thing doesn’t correlate. I know many people who can speak eloquently but are dumb as a hammer. Others stumble and bumble over words, but give them time to think and write and they are brilliant.
Biden’s problem will be his bullshitting like lying about being arrested in South Africa.
Biden is in some sort of cognitive decline.
Just go back and watch the '08 and '12 VP debates. He’s a different man.
Unfair comparison. The Democratic primary debates have been food fights. Let’s see how he does one-on-one with Bernie. That will be a fair comparison.
He has stuttered his whole life. Like other stutterers, when he’s nervous or under pressure, as in a debate, he tends to stutter more. Like most people, he doesn’t like showing any weakness, so he tries to avoid it, and that leads to his stopping mid-sentence and starting up again with the next thought.
It is not smooth, and it is annoying, but it does not affect his ability to think or work. I kind of like him better for it. We don’t need another slick politician that has no understanding of the problems of real people.
Nope!
Well, aside from the other two times he ran for president. 
Right. Naturally he ran those two times.
I blame my own early onset dementia.
Here, everyone who thinks he’s NOT demented, please go through all the examples contained herein and report back to us on why you STILL think he’s just fine and peachy. And to those who insist that Bernie getting a stent put in a few months ago disqualifies him due to health reasons–please to explain how Biden having surgery to correct two brain aneurysms (one was a centimeter wide!) in 1988 means there’s no chance he’s experiencing cognitive dysfunction due to the repairs and there’s no reason to worry about his fitness to serve as president. Show your work.
Here’s a 13 minute interview with Biden that was done this week. Watch it from start to finish. He meanders a little, but only in the context of taking a winding road to get to the answer.
Look, I’m 67 years old. I have old relatives and old friends. I’ve seen dementia close up. This isn’t what it looks like.
You’re talking about 12 and 8 years ago respectively. It’s a pretty genetically strong human who is not different at age 66 and 70 versus 78.
Look, I DON’T think Biden truly has dementia. But the stuttering isn’t an excuse for most of the weird shit he’s said. How did his stutter cause him to say “I got hairy legs and the little kids like to reach into the pool and rub my legs down”? How did his stutter cause him to say “look, fat, want to do some pushups?” to that dude who questioned him at the Town Hall? How did his stutter cause him to call that woman a “lyin’ dog-faced pony soldier”? Those are just three of his outrageous gaffes off the top of my head, I’m sure if I did some searching I could find many more. I don’t see how a stutter has any connection to the concept of making very ill-advised remarks.
Wow, we obviously need to understand the difference between dementia and the natural slowdown of cognition that comes with aging. And with Biden, there’s yet another factor. So how much does aging affect cognition in each candidate? That’s the real question.
A November, 2019 Atlantic Monthly article noted,
Sanders will be 80 in two years. The thing about cognitive decline is that, like puberty, it doesn’t occur at a steady pace or even the same pace in each individual. Sanders might be fine today but suffer a sharp decline in a couple years. Or not.
Trump, younger than either Sanders or Biden, has had the most obvious decline, possibly because he had the shortest distance to fall.
And then there’s Biden.
(same article)
But how much of that is due to Biden’s stutter? Don’t assume that avoiding stuttering entails merely pausing in conversation. Another recent Atlantic article :
When you have three top contenders in their seventies, their mental and physical health is perhaps more of a consideration than with younger candidates. That’s not ageist. But lumping together all the possible factors and calling them dementia is.
Fair enough. I shouldn’t have used blue collar.
But he attended public universities and, per Wikipedia, he grew up the middle class son of a car salesman. Biden didn’t grow up rich.
He also pretty famously never got rich from his career as a senator. While he has likely made a good of money since he retired from the Vice Presidency (what with speaking fees and book deals being available), he remained middle class during his time in congress.
I don’t think I’d call it dementia so much as normal slowing with age. He’s lost a step, sure. He’s still the best candidate in the field and definitely better than Donald Trump.
I stutter. I have since, I guess, I was able to speak. I had speech therapy as a child. I still stutter, at 60. I’ve developed a whole bunch of tricks to deal with it, but at the end of the day, I don’t care anymore. It’s not my problem, it’s the problem of those who can’t deal with it.
And I’m the primary caretaker of my elderly father. I’ve watched him start to show signs of dementia when he was just about Joe Biden’s age, some years ago, and get worse, to the point where he is no longer able to live on his own or manage his own affairs or prepare food or anything.
Biden looks to me like my father did at the beginning of the process. I’m sorry to say this, but it’s true.
I’m entirely able to separate Biden’s stutter (which appears to me to be quite mild, milder than my own) from what looks to me like the beginning of dementia.
I’m not a Bernie bro (someone upthread implied that those who believe Biden has mild dementia must be Bernie bros). I’m certainly not a Republican.
I’ll vote for Biden in the general (assuming that Sanders doesn’t pull off a miracle and take the nomination). But his choice of VP is really, really important, and I’m concerned about his ability to assess his own mental state and act accordingly, which might mean resigning the office if necessary.
That’s what I’m trying to say. Saying someone’s blue collar implies that they do some sort of working class job, and usually also implies some sort of trade or factory work- carpenter, pipefitter, truck driver, factory worker, etc…
Joe’s definitely a white collar sort, even if he’s not overly wealthy.
Well, I’m sorry about your dad but you’re not remotely qualified to diagnose over the television.
Yes at this point the only Democratic alternative is older than Biden. Few say Sanders shows cognitive decline but if he were nominated or elected he might soon, or not, as you say. Besides a recent heart attack on the physical side.
Then, people will mainly interpret the relative mental acuity of Biden and Trump through the lens of their politics. Millions nationwide besides I assume a majority here would agree ‘Trump has the most obvious decline’. Millions of others nationwide would not agree.
The risk for either side with a septuagenarian candidate is that it suddenly gets obviously worse, and I mean obvious to people with no interest in politics. In that regard I think Trump’s relaxed (irresponsibly so arguably) approach to his office and fun campaigning in front of big crowds that love him (he doesn’t go where he can’t attract such crowds) is perhaps an advantage. Campaigning is obviously harder work for Biden, and his supporters want Trump out, rather than there being any real fan base for Biden (thus people challenging him at campaign events and, ‘dog faced etc’ from him when he gets cranky). OTOH, just realistically, once it’s straight up Biden v Trump a lot of the media will be more ready to pounce on Trump than Biden, specifically broadcast news with the really big audiences compared to cable or internet blogs.
I read the transcript of the part where he said
and it’s not as out in left field as it sounds; what he was getting at is that there’s apparently a gap in the number of words that poor and not-poor children are exposed to by a certain age, and that in a lot of cases, parents don’t really know what to do in order to close that gap and he suggests playing the radio or TV, and then corrects himself and suggest playing records at night as a way of exposing children to more words.
Now we can take the harsh approach and assume that Joe is just senile and crazy, and is talking about record players like Abe Simpson talked about onions on his belt or something, or we can take a more charitable approach and assume that he meant that parents should play the radio, or some sort of music at bedtime so that kids might be passively exposed to a greater number of words in daily life. And that when he said the television, he corrected himself in the thinking that the TV might not be the best bet for children(screen time and all that), and being an old fart, record player popped into his head as the primary source of pre-recorded music, rather than “stream some music off Spotify”.
That’s pretty excusable in my book. That’s also not what dementia looks like. In my experience, dementia would be if he went off in the middle of his thing and started talking about something totally and completely unrelated and didn’t seem to realize he’d done it.
Just getting the form of pre-recorded music wrong doesn’t instantly point to dementia, and suggesting that it does is absurd.
First, I think it we are simply looking at diminished mental faculties due to age, one would really have to be wearing a giant D partisan hat to think that Trump has declined more or even anywhere close to Biden. I’m not saying that Biden is ready for a nursing home, but there is some clear decline due to age that Trump frankly has not shown at all.
Many posters on this board don’t particularly like Biden but they are supporting him because of their hatred for Trump. Many posters on this board would probably vote for pretty much any carbon based life form instead of Trump. That doesn’t bode well for Biden. I can’t really think of any campaign that has won on such a dynamic. Maybe Doug Jones v. Roy Moore, but we are nowhere near that.
Swing voters have not bought into the Anyone But Trump thinking and it will be difficult for Biden to get their support with his constant screw ups.