• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, July 23, 2024

President Biden’s hopes for a second term were derailed by the power of the clip.

The more he appeared on TV since the Waterloo of the debate on June 27, the more the Trump campaign’s trove of negative Biden clips multiplied.

The President debated with Trump on June 27, had a prime-time interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on July 5 (pictured above), held a rare, televised news conference on June 11, had a prime-time interview with NBC’s Lester Holt on July 16, and had an interview with BET’s Ed Gordon on July 19.

The tsunami of public appearances did nothing to reverse the perception by just about everyone that Biden’s cognitive abilities were in decline, presumably a consequence (and a normal one, at that) of the aging process for an 81-year-old.

Instead, much of this post-debate flurry of appearances did just the opposite. It reinforced those perceptions.

The debate itself was the launchpad for the crisis. More than 51 million people (the estimated audience over 17 broadcast and cable channels) watched as the President garbled answers, groped for words and struggled to remember what he had set out to say.

But the same issues persisted in the Stephanopoulos interview, which was a 22-minute showcase of lost and meandering thoughts, and sentences that trailed off to nowhere.

Thursday, July 11, was the worst of it. On that day at the NATO Summit, the President referred to Volodymyr Zelenskyy as “President Putin.”

Later at the White House news conference, he referred to Kamala Harris as “Vice President Trump.”

The thing about TV clips in the Internet Era is that they live forever, just like everything else. In seconds, these kinds of clips become fodder for the masses and the media.

The late-night shows lampoon them, the adversarial media place them on a kind of continuous loop, and campaign commercials pick them up and run them countless times until Election Eve.

A small example was a clip posted on CNN.com from Biden’s BET interview. “Video appears to show Biden struggling to name U.S. defense secretary,” read the headline on the story.

Indeed, in a portion of the BET interview lasting mere seconds, the President did struggle to remember the name of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and seemed to refer to him (or possibly someone else) as “the black man.”

Had Biden been in position to continue with this post-debate schedule of appearances in the weeks ahead, the damage would have been worse because it is almost a certainty that even more gaffes would be collected and curated by the opposition.

The Dems could not afford to risk the President’s appearance at the convention next month in which he would have been called upon to deliver a lengthy speech accepting his nomination.

In addition, given the result of the June 27 debate, there was no way the Democrats could have allowed the President to go ahead with that either.

Now, from an advertising standpoint, the Republicans are robbed of the issue that was likely to be at the center of all of the Trump campaign commercials -- namely, Biden’s unfitness to serve a second term. Cue the clips.

With Biden now out of the race, it is hard to see how the Republicans can continue to make hay of the President’s clips of confusion, many of which have already been in use for some time, such as video of the president stumbling or slipping on the Air Force One steps (something other presidents have also done).

The only angle the Republicans are likely to pursue now when it comes to Biden’s decline is to try and flog the scenario in which prominent Democrats and members of the Biden administration’s inner circle covered up the condition of the Commander-in-Chief and hid it from the American people.

As for Kamala Harris, 59, by all appearances she is not in decline. As a result, the opposition will have to zero in on something substantial -- her record.

With Harris’s cognitive abilities not up for discussion, some of the conservative media have become obsessed with her laugh, clips of which have also been collected, curated and shown for some time.

Thus, the question is: Who will have the last laugh now that Biden is out?