 REUTERS/Brian SnyderTHE NEWS Why did anyone think Joe Biden was ready for a 90-minute presidential debate? One reason is that a small handful of journalists, with left-leaning sympathies but very credible records, have interviewed him and those close to him in the White House and returned with reports that while he’s definitely older, he’s still pretty sharp and in charge. Two of the most prominent are Biden biographers Evan Osnos and Franklin Foer. I spoke to them Sunday as they reconciled their own portrayals with the faltering 81-year-old they saw on national television. In his deeply-reported recent New Yorker article, Osnos detailed Biden on the precipice of his final campaign, the definition of an elder statesman steeling himself for a rematch with an emboldened Donald Trump. But in his one sitdown with Biden in January (the White House declined his invitation for a second), he described an older Biden in command of his faculties: “His mind seemed unchanged. He never bungled a name or a date.” “The Biden I spoke with in January was very different from the Biden we saw on that stage Thursday night,” Osnos said Sunday. Osnos said that following Thursday’s contest, he’d concluded that Biden “clearly has good days and bad days and wretched days. What we saw was not the kind of performance that anyone would want from a candidate.” And he said he made no apologies for his journalism. For that New Yorker piece, he’d spoken at length with Biden advisers and confidantes who raved about his ability to do the job despite his age. “I don’t think I would do anything differently,” Osnos said. Foer had also defended Biden’s mental acuity since publishing his book on the president, The Last Politician, last year. He told podcast host Kara Swisher in September that the real problem was not Biden’s age, but the media’s false equivalence between that and the dangers of a second Trump presidency. “His inability to finish a sentence, or the fact that his stories occasionally trail off, is now on a continuum with Trump being a lunatic. And this is in part something that they need to combat,” Foer said at the time. “It’s also a media failing as well, that there’s just an inability to talk about the relative problems that these two senior citizens have, which I think are not the same in kind, and they’re being smushed together.” “If you gave him the type of mental acuity test that Nikki Haley talks about giving him, he would pass that,” he said. But in an Atlantic piece published on Friday, Foer compared the decision for Biden to step down to his family’s attempts to take the car keys away from his aging grandfather when he got older. In a brief note to Semafor over the weekend, he said that since publishing his book last September, he had changed his mind about the president. “I still think he has the acuity to do the job,” he said. But, he added, “I do feel differently.” | 
