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CV NEWS FEED // Two pro-Biden writers who interviewed the President earlier this year and wrote articles portraying him as elderly, yet capable, recently said that the Biden who participated in the presidential debate on June 27 was a “very different” man.
Evan Osnos, who wrote an in-depth article on Joe Biden for the New Yorker in March, told Semafor that though he wouldn’t have changed anything about his article, he was convinced after watching the debate that Biden “clearly has good days and bad days and wretched days.”
“What we saw was not the kind of performance that anyone would want from a candidate,” he added.
Author Franklin Foer published a book on Biden last year, and vouched for the President’s mental integrity in September.
“If you gave him the type of mental acuity test that Nikki Haley talks about giving him, he would pass that,” he told podcast host Kara Swisher at the time, according to Semafor.
He also added that the media is presenting different issues with both Biden and Trump that further complicates the election.
“[Biden’s] inability to finish a sentence, or the fact that his stories occasionally trail off, is now on a continuum with Trump being a lunatic. And this is in part something that they need to combat,” Foer had said, adding:
It’s also a media failing as well, that there’s just an inability to talk about the relative problems that these two senior citizens have, which I think are not the same in kind, and they’re being smushed together.”
On June 28, the day after the debate, Foer appeared to change his mind in an article for the Atlantic, where he compared Biden and the presidency to trying to take car keys away from an aging grandfather who poses risks to everyone on the road when he drives.
He told Semafor, however, that he still thinks Biden “has the acuity to do the job,” but that he does “feel differently” now than he did in September.
