Dems face a litmus test over Biden's cognitive abilities

Sen. Chris Murphy says "it was a mistake" for his party to allow then-81-year-old President Joe Biden to remain on the 2024 ballot as long as he did.

The Democrat from Connecticut, who is viewed as a possible contender for his party's 2028 presidential nomination, during an appearance on the Sunday morning talk shows was the latest Democrat to face questions about the former president's cognitive abilities.

"I saw a president who was in control," Murphy said during an interview on NBC's "Meet the Press" as he pointed to his experience working closely with Biden on legislation in 2023. "That’s my experience."

However, the senator added "that by 2024 the American public had made up their mind, right, that they wanted the Democratic Party to nominate somebody new, and it was absolutely a mistake for the party to not listen to those voters."

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He also noted that Democrats "all bear responsibility" for President Donald Trump's White House victory last November.

However, longtime Democratic Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina, a longtime Biden ally and confidant, said on the Sunday talk shows that he never doubted the then-president's ability to lead the nation.

"I never saw anything that allowed me to think that Joe Biden was not able to do the job," Clyburn argued in an appearance on CNN's "State of the Union."

Top Democrats like Murphy and Clyburn are facing a litmus test over Biden's mental acuity during his final years in office and whether Democrats should have been more strident earlier in the 2024 election cycle in calling on Biden to abandon his bid for a second term in the White House.

The grilling comes as Biden's condition is once again making headlines, courtesy of excerpts from a new book being released this week, "Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again," which offers claims of a White House cover-up of the then-president's apparent cognitive decline.

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Additionally, last week's leaked audio of Biden’s 2023 interview with special counsel Robert Hur, in which the then-president appears to suffer memory lapses, is also fueling the conversation.

Hur, who investigated whether Biden years earlier had improperly stored classified documents, made major headlines early last year when he decided not to charge Biden but described the then-president as an "elderly man with a poor memory."

The first question thrown at former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg as he briefly met with reporters following a town hall with veterans and military families in Iowa last week was,"Did President Joe Biden experience cognitive decline while in office?" Buttigieg was asked.

"Every time I needed something from him from the West Wing, I got it," answered Buttigieg, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate who served four years in Biden's cabinet. He, like Murphy, may have national ambitions in 2028.

After a second reporter followed up, asking, "Would the party have been better off if he had just not run for re-election?" Buttigieg answered, "Maybe. Right now, with the benefit of hindsight, I think most people would agree that that’s the case."

Longtime New Hampshire-based radio host Chris Ryan pointed to his listeners on his popular morning news/talk program as he told Fox News, "I think that is one of the top things that they do want to know about."

"The Democratic voters are still trying to sort through what happened and why," said Ryan, who has interviewed scores of White House hopefuls over the years.

How the Democratic presidential hopefuls answer these questions will be an early test of their truthfulness in the eyes of voters who had serious concerns over whether Biden was mentally and physically up for another four years handling the world's most grueling job.

However, Ryan noted that "it’s different for each potential candidate based on their level of proximity to President Biden."

While 2028 is far off in the distance, next year's midterms are just around the corner.

And the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), taking aim at House Democrats up for re-election in 2026, charged that "they knew."

"Americans deserved the truth, and House Democrats blatantly lied to their faces while voting to bury the evidence. Every single Democrat is complicit in the political coverup of the century," NRCC spokesman Mike Marinella claimed in a statement.

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It is doubtful the questions will be going away in the coming days, even after Sunday's blockbuster announcement that Biden was diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer that had spread to his bones.

Biden dropped out of the White House race last July, one month after a disastrous debate performance with Trump that sparked a chorus of calls from fellow Democrats for the then-president to end his re-election bid.

He was replaced at the top of the ticket by then-Vice President Kamala Harris, who ended up losing November's presidential election to Trump. Democrats also suffered down ballot, losing control of the Senate and failing to win back the House majority from the Republicans.

During an appearance on ABC's "The View" two weeks ago, Biden pushed back against accusations that he had suffered significant cognitive decline during the final year of his presidency.

Rep. Ro Khanna of California was a leading supporter and surrogate on the campaign trail for Biden during the 2024 election cycle. After last June’s debate, as a trickle of Democrats urging Biden to step aside turned into a steady stream, Khanna likened the embattled president to Rocky Balboa—the underdog boxer of big-screen legend.

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"To rebuild trust, Democrats must be honest. In light of the facts that have come out, Joe Biden should not have run for reelection, and we should have had an open primary," Khanna wrote in a social media post.

Khanna, in a statement, said, "I have always admired Biden’s resilience and the grit he has shown after the loss of his son — and often compared that strength to Rocky. I was a surrogate for the president of my own party whose policies I backed.

"But obviously we did not have the full picture, and in hindsight it is painfully obvious that President Biden should have made the patriotic decision not to run," Khanna added.

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Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, another possible White House candidate who was a top 2024 surrogate for Biden, said in a recent CNN interview when asked about Biden's cognitive abilities, "As a governor in a state halfway across the country who was working her tail off, 160 stops on a bus tour that I had lined through swing states, I was busy working. I was busy doing the voter connection and registration, and so can't speak to that directly." 

"I didn't see the president frequently."

However, she added that "it does make me question a lot of the things I thought I knew over the course of the last year and a half."

While the potential contenders are answering questions concerning Biden in different ways, there is one consensus.

"We're not in a position to wallow in hindsight. We've got to get ready for some fundamental tests of the future of this country and this party," Buttigieg noted.