New Yorker Harris Endorsement: Biden Collapse a ‘Gift’

The editorial board for The New Yorker endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential bid on Sunday in a piece in which President Joe Biden’s “nationally televised disintegration” in his debate with Donald Trump was hailed as a “gift” for Democrats.

Sunday’s endorsement of Harris was a notable pivot from a piece published by the outlet in March in which Biden was praised for remaining “defiant” amid concerns about his mental acuity and age.

Alex Thompson with Axios flagged the two pieces. He noted that just over six months ago, The New Yorker praised Biden for remaining mentally sharp even if he appeared frail after he had sat down for an interview with journalist Evan Osnos.

Osnos wrote of Biden in March:

For decades, there was a lightness about Joe Biden—a springy, mischievous energy that was hard not to like, even if it allowed some people to classify him as a lightweight. For better and worse, he is a more solemn figure now. His voice is thin and clotted, and his gestures have slowed, but, in our conversation, his mind seemed unchanged. He never bungled a name or a date. At one point, he pulled out a white notecard inscribed with some of Trump’s most alarming comments: his threat to terminate the Constitution, his casual talk of being a dictator on “Day One,” his description of immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country.

In Sunday’s endorsement of Harris, The New Yorker‘s editorial board wrote:

Yet no debates have been as unusual or as consequential as the two we have just witnessed. The first—on June 27th, in Atlanta, between Trump and President Biden—proved to be an unmasking. On a human level, Biden’s nationally televised disintegration was a poignant spectacle. Viewed more coldly, it was a gift. Had it taken place, say, after the Conventions, it might have been too late to force a reassessment.

It was hardly a secret that Biden has aged, growing markedly less robust, particularly in the past eighteen months or so. If he got through an interview or a (rare) press conference without incident, staff and supporters exhaled and treated it as a victory. But, rather than open the gate to a younger generation of Democratic candidates, Biden, his advisers, and the Party leadership stood in the way.

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