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.”
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Advisors to President Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama disagreed on whether Biden should run for re-election in 2024. (REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY)
“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…
