Biden's chief of staff scolded Obama campaign architect for calling Biden's age an issue, book reveals
Former President Joe Biden's decision to run for re-election divided longtime Democratic advisors, a new book about Biden's cognitive decline and his administration's alleged cover-up revealed.
Biden's former Chief of Staff, Ron Klain, shut down former President Barack Obama advisor David Axelrod for repeatedly calling Biden's age an issue.
"The presidency is a monstrously taxing job and the stark reality is the president would be closer to 90 than 80 at the end of a second term, and that would be a major issue," Axelrod told The New York Times.
Soon after the Times' story was published in June 2022, Klain called Axelrod fuming, CNN anchor Jake Tapper and Axios political correspondent Alex Thompson revealed in their book, "Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again."
"Who's going to beat Trump? President Biden is the only one who has done it. You better have a lot of certainty about a different candidate before you say the president should step aside. The future of the country depends on it!" Klain told Axelrod on the phone, according to Thompson and Tapper.
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Klain believed it was "sloppy thinking" that anyone other than Biden could beat Trump, the journalists said in the book.
But Axelrod, like most Americans, worried about the first octogenarian president's age and his ability to serve four more years.
The chief strategist for Obama's back-to-back winning campaigns, Axelrod was one of the last advisers to meet with Biden before Obama chose him as his running mate in 2008. Axelrod told Tapper and Thompson that they didn't expect Biden to run for president at 73 and eventually discouraged Biden from running for president in 2015.
They certainly didn't expect Biden to run for president at 77.
After Axelrod made some friendly comments about Biden to a reporter in 2018, Biden invited him to his rental home in Virginia, according to the book.
"He was stunned by how much Biden had aged," Tapper and Thompson wrote.
Axelrod told Biden that age would be an issue for his campaign but encouraged him to lean on his experience and wisdom, the journalists said.
Axelrod's apprehension about Biden's age only grew, and when it came time for Biden to make a decision about his re-election, he knew Biden shouldn't run in 2024. The longtime political advisor told Tapper and Thompson he wished someone in the White House had "come to their senses and [convinced] Biden and his family that this just wasn't tenable."
Pointing to unfavorable battleground polls from 2023, Axelrod encouraged Biden to drop out of the race in a series of social media posts. He said the "stakes of miscalculation here are too dramatic to ignore."
"Only @JoeBiden can make this decision. If he continues to run, he will be the nominee of the Democratic Party. What he needs to decide is whether that is wise; whether it's in HIS best interest or the country's?" Axelrod questioned on social media.
Klain fired back, this time for the public to see: "Man who called Biden ‘Mr Magoo’ in Aug 2019 is still at it," in reference to Axelrod's comments following the 2019 Democratic presidential primary debate.
An excerpt from the book reads: "In response to Axelrod's 2023 post, Biden called Axelrod a ‘prick’ – a private insult until someone leaked it to Jonathan Martin of Politico. Axelrod received confidential messages of agreement from prominent Democrats who remained silent, they explained, because they were resigned to Biden's candidacy and did not want to weaken him as a looming rematch with Trump approached."
Fox News Digital has written extensively, dating back to the 2020 presidential campaign, about Biden's cognitive decline and his inner circle’s role in covering it up.
"There is nothing in this book that shows Joe Biden failed to do his job, as the authors have alleged, nor did they prove their allegation that there was a cover-up or conspiracy," a Biden spokesperson told Fox News Digital. "Nowhere do they show that our national security was threatened or where the president wasn’t otherwise engaged in the important matters of the presidency. In fact, Joe Biden was an effective president who led our country with empathy and skill."
