ATLANTA — Super Tuesday (March 5), as well as Georgia’s own Presidential Primary (March 12), are both fast approaching.
In fact, early voting for Georgia’s Primary begins Feb. 19, just a week from Monday.
And issues of age, centering on both parties’ leading candidates, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, are again in focus.
Democrats now have new concerns about Pres. Biden’s mental fitness for the job.
In battleground Georgia on Thursday -- hours after the Special Counsel report was released, describing President Joe Biden as having a “poor memory” about his own career and family—Democratic activists were gearing up to ask voters to keep Biden in office until he is 86.
At the annual fundraiser for the Democratic Party of Georgia, the party chair, Rep. Nikema Williams, (D) Atlanta, was upbeat to a cheering crowd.
“This is the year that we cement our status as a true, blue state,” Rep. Williams said, “by sending President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris back to the White House!”
Emory University Political Science Professor Dr. Andra Gillespie said Democrats are likely to face the issue by denying there is an issue.
“Democrats are going to rally around the candidate that they have,” she said Friday. “This really isn't a time to be wishing for another candidate because it's really too late to be changing course at this point... there is not a viable alternative Democratic candidate waiting in the wings.”
So the president’s top supporters launched their counter-offensive on Friday, calling the descriptions of Biden having a poor memory “gratuitous and inappropriate criticisms of the President,” in the words of Ian Sams of the White House Counsel’s office at a press briefing.
Vice President Kamala Harris echoed what Sams said: “Gratuitous and inappropriate criticisms of the President, and clearly politically motivated.”
“My memory’s fine,” President Biden told reporters Thursday. Then, as was widely reported, Mr. Biden referred to the President of Mexico by mistakenly using the name of Egypt’s President: “The President of Mexico, Sisi....”
“And so that's the problem,” Gillespie said. “There's been this long-standing narrative that Joe Biden is perhaps past his prime. And then it gets reinforced every time somebody reports on a gaffe that he makes, anytime he confuses people or, you know, places people in the wrong decade.”
As for former President Donald Trump’s mental fitness for office, “Considering that President Trump is not much younger than President Biden,” Gillespie said that 2024 could be the year when voters could be more concerned than they have been in previous elections about who should be Vice President, to be first in line of succession.
“I think this amplifies the importance of the Vice Presidential candidates in ways that VP candidates are usually not important,” she said. “The VP choices matter.”
Potentially, she said, making the running mates a key to who wins in 2024.