Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., now says former President Joe Biden should not have run for reelection last year.
Khanna told The Daily Signal that he had not been given the full picture on Biden’s declining health condition.
“I only saw Biden a few times and was not given the full picture. In light of the facts that came out, Biden should not have run for reelection, and we should have had an open primary,” he said.
That was a dramatic change in tone for the California congressman, who previously had likened Biden to the boxing movie character Rocky Balboa after the then-president’s terrible June 27 debate performance.
The discussion about the former president comes as CNN host Jake Tapper and Axios national political correspondent Alex Thompson’s explosive new book on the Biden presidency titled “Original Sin” hits bookstore shelves. The book, subtitled “President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” extensively details what it says was the cover-up over Biden’s infirmity as he ran for reelection in 2024.
Other prominent Democrats have said they were concerned about Biden’s health during the 2024 presidential race, but that’s not what they said publicly when Biden was still running for reelection, before dropping out of the race on July 21.
California Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom projected confidence in Biden’s ability to handle the job of the presidency right after the former president’s widely criticized debate performance against his predecessor, Donald Trump, but before the then-president bowed out.
“Remember: All the impacts of climate change, all the forest fires, all those floods, the drought, all these impacts—Marine One, Air Force One. I’ve spent time—hours and hours in the aggregate—on the phone with him, was just with [Biden at] a major fundraiser we did down in L.A. two weeks ago. I’ve never seen him like that debate night,” Newsom said at a fundraiser with Michigan Democrats soon after Biden’s debate performance.
That talking point contrasted sharply from what was on display from Biden at a June 2023 fundraiser that Newsom attended, which Tapper and Thompson’s book characterized as leaving participants “shaken by Biden’s meandering remarks.”
Pennsylvania Democrat Gov. Josh Shapiro also acted differently in private than in public.
“I can tell you that I was very frank with the president during his campaign about what I saw were some of the shortcomings,” Shapiro explained to Politico in an article published Friday.
“I was very honest with him in a private setting about that,” the Pennsylvania governor told the publication.
In August 2024, however, Shapiro had denied that anything was amiss with Biden in public.
He claimed he had no concerns over Biden’s slipping and emphasized that he had “been in regular contact with the president.”
