NBC Analyst Says Biden Campaign’s Biggest ‘Worry’ Is It May Be Impossible To Convince Voters He’s Competent

NBC national affairs analyst John Heilemann on Friday said President Joe Biden’s campaign’s largest concern is that persuading certain voters the president is competent may be a lost cause.

Biden’s cognitive capabilities have repeatedly been raised as a possible problem, with NBC political analyst Elise Jordan earlier on Friday saying voters tell her they will be tuning into the upcoming presidential debate to “make sure that he’s up to the task” of being president. Heilemann on “Morning Joe” said the campaign’s deepest fear is that there may be no solution to persuading voters who have “stubborn concerns about” the president, based in part on an interview he conducted with Biden campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon.

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“I think that the thing, Katty, that worries them, is that the information environment is what it is,” Heilemann told MSNBC contributor Katty Kay. “And so I asked to kind of try to make the case for, you know we see surrogates all the time go on TV and say, ‘I was in a meeting with Joe Biden recently and he seemed great.’ And I said, ‘Look, most of those people have been at one meeting with Joe Biden or a couple. You spend more time with him or as much time with him as anybody in the White House over the course of the last three years. How do you make the case that Biden is, give me a vivid reason to believe that for those who say Joe Biden is not up to the job?’”

“And she told a great story … emotional, powerful, vivid, but it’s a four or five-minute long story,” he added. “And in this information environment … the voters they have to reach are people who don’t hear the five-minute story. They’re never going to see Joe Biden that way. What they’re going to see is deep fakes, cheap fakes and not fakes, but images, quick images that leave a certain impression. And trying to reach people in this environment is really hard, reach anyone in the environment we live in now in the information ecosystem.”