A new book by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson details behind-the-scenes struggles of President Joe Biden’s 2024 reelection campaign, including a failed attempt to film a campaign ad.
In Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, Tapper and Thompson describe a closed-to-the-press town hall event in April 2024 at a high school gym in Biden’s home state of Delaware. The event, which featured a friendly audience and a list of pre-approved voter questions, was intended to produce footage of Biden speaking fluidly in a freewheeling setting. However, the footage was entirely unusable.
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The authors write, “Some blamed the gym’s lighting for the event being a dud, while others firmly pointed the finger at Biden’s performance.” “The man could not speak,” said one person involved, according to the book. Staff attributed Biden’s struggles to an inability to find words or stay on topic, rather than his long-documented stutter.
The campaign had hoped the footage would form the basis of a campaign commercial showing Biden taking unscripted questions. Cameras rolled for 90 minutes, but despite the controlled setting and scripted questions, the final product could not be salvaged.
The episode, Tapper and Thompson argue, show “the lengths that Biden’s campaign went to cover for his deficiencies as an 81-year-old re-election candidate — and how difficult he made it to carry out the basic blocking and tackling of a modern campaign.”
The staged town hall was reportedly one of many efforts to produce presentable video content of the President. The book details how Biden’s team often relied on two-camera setups to facilitate editing, allowing staff to mask flubbed lines with jump cuts. Even then, many videos were deemed unsalvageable due to the extent of the edits, with some cuts so noticeable that staffers regretted releasing the footage.
“Every shoot was anxiety-inducing for Biden’s team,” Tapper and Thompson wrote.
While the use of multiple cameras and staged town halls is not uncommon in political campaigns, the book suggests the Biden team’s dependence on these methods reached troubling levels. Biden reportedly did “virtually no authentic town halls.”
The White House often reduced requested taped messages to shorter durations. “When supportive groups requested a taped five-minute video address from Biden, the White House would respond by saying the video would be one or two minutes,” the authors report.
President Biden and First Lady Jill Biden have pushed back on claims of cognitive decline. “The people who wrote those books were not in the White House with us, and they didn’t see how hard Joe worked every single day,” Jill Biden said earlier this month during the Bidens’ appearance on The View. She acknowledged that age had slowed the President physically, but denied it affected his job performance.
Original Sin is based on interviews with over 200 individuals, mostly Democratic insiders, conducted after the 2024 election. The book offers a detailed and often critical look at the final years of Biden’s presidency and the inner workings of his reelection effort, writes Axios.
