Below, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries on MSNBC this morning defending Presdient Biden's debate performance as a merely a bad night.
This is what I saw when I looked at HUFFPOST to see what their top stories were. They had three.
NBC News: Biden Expected To Discuss Future Of Campaign With Family On Sunday
NBC News reports that President Joe Biden will travel to Camp David Sunday where he and First Lady Jill Biden are scheduled to join their children and grandchildren.
The trip had been planned before Thursday's debate, in which Biden gave a disastrous performance that has left Democrats on edge.
According to NBC News sources, "there is an understanding among top Democrats that Biden should be given space to determine next steps."
Insiders reportedly "believe only the president, in consultation with his family, can decide whether to move forward or to end his campaign early."
New Axios Report Suggests Reason Biden Appeared Sluggish At Debate
Biden is typically at his sharpest between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., according to Axios, which cited discussions with eight current and former Biden aides.
Thursday night’s debate was five hours after that window. Quite simply, it might have been too late in the day for him to present his best self.
Axios reported that the staffers have seen “flashes of an absent-minded Biden” akin to the version who took long pauses and delivered meandering sentences in a low, hoarse voice onstage this week. But they reportedly dismiss these moments because he is alert and engaged at other times.
International travel is also particularly tiring for the president, the outlet said.
New Yorker editor David Remnick Calls For Biden To Drop Out Of Presidential Race
New Yorker Editor David Remnick called for Biden to drop out of the presidential race following his disastrous debate performance on Thursday.
In a scathing editorial, Remnick said Biden’s age can no longer be ignored, and that watching him fumble during the debate was an “agonizing experience.”
“You watched it, and, on the most basic human level, you could only feel pity for the man and, more, fear for the country,” Remnick wrote.
While Remnick acknowledged that finding a new nominee would be an “admittedly complicated process,” he argued that it would still be the more “rational course.”
“To stay in the race would be pure vanity, uncharacteristic of someone whom most have come to view as decent and devoted to public service,” Remnick added.
I addressed this issue in yesterday's blog.
We cannot treat what we saw with Biden during the debate as a one-off. If someone persistently had certain physical conditions that occurred at a consistent time of day if they had any sense they would see their doctor. Cognitive conditions tend to be treated differently. They are easier to dismiss.
I am 80 years old. I know I am more alert and articulate at certain times of the day than I am at others. I usually am up at 5 and working on my blog and I stay energized until 2 PM when I get sleepy and if at all possible I take a nap for an hour. Most of the time when I wake up I feel refreshed and alert, although sometimes I have trouble shaking the cobwebs out of my head. Then I am alert until about 7 PM when I start to get sleepy. I go to bed and watch MSNBC or listen to NPR for about two hours before I sleep, sometimes with the TV or radio on.
When I wake up at around 11 to go to the bathroom I am fairly wide awake and often stay in bed thinking of a blog topic for the morning. I know I could get up and start to write it but instead of throwing my sleep pattern off I compose a a general outline in my mind and thankfully fall asleep and wake up remembering what I planned to write.
I consider what would happen if I had to help someone in crisis at that hour and I think I'd be able to rouse myself enough to assist them, even to (as has happened) drive them to the emergency room. If I was president or a member of the team that was called to the White House Situation Room in the wee hours of the morning I might not be at 100% right away but with a cup of high octane coffee I think I could fire up all cylinders. We have to know that Biden could do the same thing.
President Biden, as I have wirtten in the previous blogs, showed signs of sundowning in the debate which could be part of early dementia. "Could" doesn't mean is. He could just have what, for want of a more clinical term, an aging brain. If this is the case he could still continue as the excellent president he's been as long as this doesn't change significantly for the worse. That is of serious concern. The Biden we see today may not be the Biden of one or two years from now.
Any elder with any self awareness knows this about themselves. My senior friends and I certainly do. We try to take advantage of the years we have left. I have a good friend who, when he turned 90 and was able to get around using just a cane, went with his entire family on a European tour. Now, 93, while mentally as sharp as he was at 90, he needs an electric wheelchair.
As for Biden, there are certainly work-arounds for cyclical daily cognitive changes. Scheduling meetings when you're at your best makes sense. Naps can be crucial. Consider the following from the website Somnology
1. “A night owl with a bedtime”
President Obama reportedly slept around 5 hours a night, preferring to hit the sack well past midnight and wake at 7 A.M. Sleep patterns like this are mostly dictated by our circadian rhythms, but these rhythms can be flexible depending on our personal schedules. Being a night owl (or an early bird), then, can sometimes be a blend of nature and nurture.
2. “Napping across party lines”
Ronald Reagan, JFK, and Bill Clinton napped daily; Reagan even made a schedule for his naps and took them at the same time each day. While there are pros and cons to napping, research indicates that a properly executed nap increases alertness, performance, and memory. All great benefits to have if you’re the leader of the free world.
The questions about Biden's cognitive fitness to serve has caused a schism among his supporters with editorial boards and highly regarded opinion columnists call for him to step down and pundits minimizing the debate as just one bad night.
This is by Charlie Dent, former representative for Pennsylvania’s 15th congressional district.
He wrote:
It's time to say the quiet part out loud: Democrats must replace President Joe Biden as their party's nominee for president. If Democrats truly believe Trump is a threat to the constitutional orderand the rights of Americans, then they will need a better candidate to make the argument. At Thursday night’s debate, Biden looked and acted old, tired and feeble. He struggled to cite facts and statistics to bolster his arguments. Some of his responses were incoherent and rambling, like one early in the debate that elicited a rare truthful and accurate statement from Trump: “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said either.”
Ali Velchi on his MSNBC show just said that Biden's team has to convince voters not to let 90 minutes define a presidency. He talked about this Politico article.
I have to disagree with the notion that we can't let 90 minutes define a presidency. If those 90 minutes were disgnostic of either dementia or "an aging brain" we have to take the possiblity seriously. If this performance was caused by a cold medication (as I wrote yesterday) we need to know.
It is quite possible that Biden is what scientists call a super-ager. Consider:
Excerpt:
When it comes to aging, we tend to assume that cognition gets worse as we get older. Our thoughts may slow down or become confused, or we may start to forget things, like the name of our high school English teacher or what we meant to buy at the grocery store.
But that’s not the case for everyone.
For a little over a decade, scientists have been studying a subset of people they call “super-agers.” These individuals are age 80 and up, but they have the memory ability of a person 20 to 30 years younger.
Most research on aging and memory focuses on the other side of the equation — people who develop dementia in their later years. But, “if we’re constantly talking about what’s going wrong in aging, it’s not capturing the full spectrum of what’s happening in the older adult population,” said Emily Rogalski, a professor of neurology at the University of Chicago, who published one of the first studies on super-agers in 2012.
A paper published Monday in the Journal of Neuroscience helps shed light on what’s so special about the brains of super-agers. The biggest takeaway, in combination with a companion study that came out last year on the same group of individuals, is that their brains have less atrophy than their peers’ do.
There has been speculation as to whether there will be a second debate. If Biden choses not to drop out I think there should be. I expect Trump wants to have a second go at Biden having seen how poorly he performed the first time, perhaps with new debate rules. For Biden's part I think he owes it to the nation to demonstrate that when necessary he can be the 10 AM to 4 PM Joe Biden between 9:00 PM and 10:30 PM.
This is a problem that won't go away. Even as I finish this bog it is being discussed again on MSNBC in referenceto this Atlanta Journal-Constitution article.
Jamie Raskin just said that Barack Obama had one bad night, referring to his first debate with Mitt Romney. Other's have also made this comparison. Nobody at the time suggested that Obama's bad debate performance might have been caused by dementia or an aging brian.
Update:
This is the current HUFFPOST main page:
The brain in the White House matters:
You can read this and previous blogs on two websites. One may look better than the other because of how the platforms present the page.
Read on the WordPress Stressline.org
or….
Read on the Google Blogger platform HalBrown.org This version has a Disquis comment section which makes it easy to post links and images.
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