It was Biden’s big screen test but, in truth, he rather blew it before it began.
A couple of hours before he took the stage, the president had a ‘Putin’ moment – mistakenly introducing Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy as “President Putin”.
It was already the gaffe of the day.
Biden might have led a successful NATO conference but it was a meme-tastic moment to define his performance for the screen-scrolling generation, the very one he needs onside.
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‘Ladies and gentlemen: President Putin’
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Joe Biden spoke economy, foreign policy and “domestic division” as he rolled out his record.
His difficulty, by now, is an audience that can’t hear one sentence for the anticipation of what he’ll say next.
He was asked about Kamala Harris and he mistakenly called her “vice-president Trump.”
Like the Putin gaffe, it was a mistake that anyone could make. If Biden himself had made it a couple of years ago, it would have gone unnoticed.
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Biden makes fresh gaffe in first question from media
His problem now is that every sign of infirmity, large or small, feeds into an established narrative – one that tells the story of a stubborn old president, cosseted by a government machine not listening to a growing crescendo of concern for his mental fitness.
Over the course of the news conference lasting an hour, he did actually hold it together.
As a politician talking politics, he sounded as comfortable as it gets at the age of 81. On the subject matter, he sounded across his brief and finished with the certainty that he was the “best qualified to govern and to win”.
The uncertainty is ‘was it good enough?’
Not for Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence committee, who called for the president to step down within minutes of the news conference ending.
On the night of the big news conference, the big question is now: How many will follow?