If Democrats were previously hoping to replay the 2020 “basement” strategy to get President Biden reelected this year, that hope is gone. It vanished with the release of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report on Biden’s criminal mishandling of highly classified documents.
To be sure, the immediate, short-term consequences of Hur’s report are bad enough for Biden. The report officially concluded that Biden suffers from diminished mental capacity at least in the colloquial, if not strictly legal, sense. Hur pointed specifically to Biden’s diminished mental state as the reason for his decision not to prosecute. On top of that, the report forced Biden to respond in a hastily assembled, same-day press conference. Biden’s performance in that press conference only raised more alarms about his mental faculties.
Yet the indirect consequences of Hur’s report may be even more difficult for the Biden team to deal with over the long term. In particular, the Hur report ended any chance that the Biden campaign had of successfully deploying the “basement” strategy that hid Biden from the public’s view in 2020. Needless to say, the Covid excuse gave the Biden team the perfect cover to deploy that strategy last election. It won’t work now.
Even before Hur’s report was released, the American public had been expressing an unusually high level of concern about Biden’s fitness for office. A recent NBC News poll found that more than three-quarters, 76 percent, of American voters are concerned about Biden’s physical and mental health.
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