As Biden tries to defuse the age issue with jokes, he makes two gaffes in 24 hours

Joe Biden’s latest gaffe is making news today.

President Biden says Putin’s ‘losing the war in Iraq.’
This is getting so regular and so embarrassing now. 🙄pic.twitter.com/vGS051ZNet

— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) June 28, 2023

Insider notes that this is the 2nd time Biden has made this mistake in 24 hours. The gaffe above took place this morning but Biden did the same thing last night.

On Tuesday night, at a fundraiser in Chevy Chase, Maryland, Biden referred to Ukraine as “Iraq” when touting the unity of NATO in the aftermath of the Russian invasion, according to a White House transcript of his remarks.

“If anybody told you — and my staff wasn’t so sure, either — that we’d be able to bring all of Europe together in the onslaught on Iraq and get NATO to be completely united, I think they would have told you it’s not likely,” said Biden. “The one thing Putin counted on was being able to split NATO.”

Of course gaffes are noting new for Biden, he’s been making them for decades. But now that he’s running for president as the oldest man ever to run for president (again) it’s more of a concern. Polls show a majority of Americans are concerned about Biden’s age and fitness.

Sixty-eight percent of voters are concerned that Biden doesn’t have the necessary mental and physical health to be president, including 55% who say they have “major” concerns — up significantly from when this question was last asked during the 2020 election…

Sixty percent of voters are concerned about Biden being re-elected and serving another four years in the White House, including 46% who say they have major concerns.

That’s from an NBC poll released this week but a Q-poll published last month also found that, even among Democrats, 41% are concerned about Biden’s fitness.

Registered voters 65 – 32 percent think that Joe Biden is too old to effectively serve another 4-year term as president. Republicans (90 – 8 percent) and independents (69 – 28 percent) think that Biden is too old, while Democrats 57 – 41 percent think that Biden is not too old to effectively serve another 4-year term as president.

Of course that still leaves a majority of Democrats who don’t see a problem (curiously, 51% of Democrats thought Trump was too old to run again) but winning a bare majority of your own party on the question isn’t a great look. In short, Biden has a serious age issue that he has to contend with. How can he do that?

NBC News noticed that Biden has been doing his best to make light of his age in recent weeks. It turns out this is part of a strategy to defuse the issue.

In the past two weeks, Biden has been cracking jokes about his age more often than usual, according to an NBC News analysis of his remarks.

He’s dropped some version of the punchline — he’s old and he knows it — during events on gun safety and international diplomacy, at campaign fundraisers and in a speech about abortion rights. The more direct approach, as Biden ramps up his re-election campaign, is a shift from the way he’s typically tried to make light of his age: by noting he’s “been around a long time.”…

As the president’s 80th birthday approached in November, White House officials began looking for ways to downplay the number with humor, according to a former Biden White House official. The conspicuous milestone invited extra media scrutiny of Biden’s age and inside the West Wing kicked off in earnest a more deliberate strategy for addressing it.

“Joking about age allows him to simultaneously own the advantages of experience and defuse through humor any doubts about fitness,” the former official said.

The president embraced the self-deprecating humor approach after discussions with aides and allies about how to best attempt to neutralize his most glaring political weakness, a Biden adviser said, given it’s something he cannot change.

Maybe Biden can normalize the age issue by joking about it frequently. Eventually people will get tired of the joke and will want to stop hearing about it. But obviously that doesn’t change the fact that Biden’s age is showing. It’s not just the gaffes. It’s him falling down at the Air Force graduation (photo above). It’s also his need for cheat sheets at public events which seem to contain quite a bit of help. It’s obvious this is a problem but I guess it’s one Democrats can’t afford to acknowledge right now. One day we’ll have lots of stories about how insiders saw BIden’s decline happening up close but the lid is on those stories until November 2024.

Here’s MSNBC’s coverage of the story which contains some clips of Biden making these jokes.