Benjamin Oreskes and Faith E. Pinho | (TNS) Los Angeles Times
For those with questions about the leading 2024 presidential candidates’ mental acuity, or those involved in stoking the increasingly heated spin online around such questions, Saturday night was a bonanza.
President Joe Biden appeared to “freeze up,” as the New York Post put it, as he walked offstage at a downtown Los Angeles fundraising appearance with former President Barack Obama and late-night host Jimmy Kimmel.
“A scene right out of ‘Weekend at Bernie’s,’” Chris LaCivita, senior Trump campaign advisor and chief operating officer of the Republican National Committee, told The Times.
The Biden campaign and its allies accused the Post and others who circulated the “freeze” meme of misrepresenting the footage. In other cases they went further, attacking media outlets and Republicans for sharing doctored video of the president.
“Rupert Murdoch’s sad little Super Pac, the New York Post, is back to disrespecting its readers and itself once again by pretending the President taking in an applauding crowd for a few seconds is somehow wrong,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said on X.
The same evening, former President Donald Trump called for his 2024 rival to take a “cognitive test,” claiming he himself had “aced” one while in office — then botched the name of the doctor who administered it. “Ronny Johnson. Does everybody know Ronny Johnson?” Trump said, meaning Dr. Ronny Jackson, who is now a Texas congressman.
Next week’s debate, which will be broadcast by CNN and simulcast on other networks, will be one of the few moments for the public to view the candidates side-by-side, unfiltered, for an extended period of time. Voters will be able to judge for themselves each man’s vitality, energy and mental acuity.
Peter Reed, director of the Sanford Center for Aging at the University of Nevada Reno, said it’s not possible to know a person’s mental acuity based on video snippets. Cognitive and physical capabilities vary from person to person — and there’s no way to tell just by watching a five-second clip, he added.
“It would be extremely difficult for me as a professional to watch either of the presidential candidates on TV, or see something that was posted on social media, and make an accurate assessment of their abilities. I just don’t think that that’s possible,” Reed said. “And frankly, any nonprofessionals that are armchair diagnosing either of these folks are off base.”
This potential inflection point in the campaign — one of two scheduled debates between the men — comes as the candidates and their allies grab hold of video moments of alleged or apparent slippage, circulating them for maximum outrage on TikTok, X and Instagram. In a race between an 81-year-old incumbent and a 78-year-old challenger, age has been fully weaponized.
Just days before the L.A. fundraiser, critics claimed video showed Biden wandering off during a G-7 summit. (“Meanderer in chief,” the New York Post said.) In fact, he was walking over to greet some French paratroopers.
The political combat via video images further draws attention to the fact …read more
Source:: The Mercury News – Entertainment
