US president Joe Biden said in an interview released on Wednesday that he would re-evaluate whether to stay in the presidential race if a doctor told him directly that he had a medical condition that made that necessary.
Mr Biden has said repeatedly that none of his doctors have told him he has a serious medical condition. Dr Kevin O’Connor, the White House physician, wrote after the president’s physical in February that Mr Biden is “a healthy, active, robust, 81-year-old male who remains fit to successfully execute the duties of the presidency”.
But his disastrous performance at a debate with former president Donald Trump last month, which prompted calls by Democratic allies to step aside, raised questions about his health and acuity.
In an interview with Ed Gordon of BET News, Mr Biden was asked if there was anything that would make him re-evaluate staying in the race.
“If I had some medical condition that emerged, if somebody, if doctors came to me and said, you got this problem and that problem,” Mr Biden said, according to a brief excerpt released by the network.
The comment is the latest in a series of shifting explanations by the president about what might cause him to reconsider. In an interview with ABC News this month, Mr Biden said he would drop out only if the “Lord almighty” told him to. At a news conference in Washington several days later, he said he would stay in the race unless aides came to him with proof that he could never win.
In the BET interview, he conceded that he “made a serious mistake in the whole debate” and would re-evaluate his decision if one of his doctors changed their assessment of him.
Mr Biden also said for the first time that he had expected to “move on” from the presidency and “pass it on to somebody else” but decided to run again because he believed his “wisdom” and experience would help heal the country’s worsening divisions.
“I said I was going to be a transitional candidate, and I thought I would be able to move on from this and pass it on to somebody else,” the president said. “But I didn’t anticipate things getting so, so, so divided. And quite frankly, I think the only thing age brings is a little bit of wisdom.”
It is the most explicit that Mr Biden has been in suggesting that he considered serving one term when he ran in 2020. At the time, he said he would be a transitional candidate who could serve as a bridge to a new generation of political leaders.
That was widely seen by many Democrats as Mr Biden hinting that he would pass the torch to vice-president Kamala Harris to run in the 2024 election.
But the president’s political advisers have said the bridge was an eight-year span and his re-election to a second term would simply be a longer transition to the new generation than some had expected.
Now, with his comments in the BET interview, Mr Biden indicated that he had initially expected to serve one term but changed his mind.
Meanwhile, Democratic US representative Adam Schiff called on Mr Biden to end his re-election bid in a statement to the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday, becoming the 20th congressional Democrat to do so.
“A second Trump presidency will undermine the very foundation of our democracy, and I have serious concerns about whether the president can defeat Donald Trump in November,” Mr Schiff, a California Democrat who is running for the Senate, was quoted as saying. – This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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