'Republicans made a huge mistake': Analyst says even far-right isn't calling Biden old now
President Joe Biden delivered the State of the Union Address Thursday amid claims by Republicans that he was too old, had dementia, and couldn't handle the burden of the job.
The mistake the Republicans made, said MSNBC's John Heilemann, is that they set the bar so low that anyone could clear it. Instead, Biden crushed it to such a degree that Republicans now claim he's "too angry" or even that he's on drugs to give him energy.
Political insiders and Beltway media "had one thing they were looking at last night," he explained. "None of the rest of this mattered. It had become a speech about whether Joe Biden was capable of running, of doing this. You can talk about why we got to that point, but that was the thing. It was a binary thing."
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Heilemann explained that's exactly what Biden did.
"Republicans made a huge mistake, not just Republicans themselves but their right-wing media who set the bar at, you know, he's a corpse," Heilemann quipped. "He can dribble out on his shirt. He's not competent. Not only did Biden clear the bar, but he soared way above it in terms of energy, aggression, aggressiveness, the prosecutorial nature of it, and the speed of it."
He acknowledged that Biden stumbled a few times, but "he stumbled or stuttered. You got The New York Post headline, 'He's Alive!' That is not a small thing in this moment where Democrats are panicking, Republicans are licking their chops."
Now, Heilemann explained, "the idea that this guy is just feeble and incapable and going to make an idiot of himself in this race, that, at least for this news cycle, is now gone. And the reason you can tell is [how] Republicans decide to attack him. The speech is too partisan, talking too fast, yelling too loud. Nobody is saying, 'Boy, Joe Biden looked old. Boy, Joe Biden looked feeble. You didn't hear that from anyone; even the far-right people were not saying that."
See the clip of the discussion in the video below or at the link here.
Nobody is saying Joe Biden is too old now www.youtube.com