Democratic Gubernatorial Candidate Maintains She Saw No Evidence Biden Was Withering Away

Democrat Georgia gubernatorial candidate Keisha Lance Bottoms claimed Friday that she saw no indication that former President Joe Biden was declining.

Bottoms, who worked as a White House adviser until 2023, claimed that she did not “experience” Biden’s decline that had been detailed in “Original Sin,” a newly released book by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson. The book revealed that Biden did not recognize his longtime acquaintance, George Clooney, and that his aides contemplated putting him in a wheelchair due to his halting walk.

“Well I worked with President Biden as a senior adviser in the White House and I left in ’23. That was not my experience in the White House or my experience when I interacted with him on the campaign,” Bottoms told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “Listen, there was a tough election in ’24 and what we saw was the economy was on the table. And right now, people aren’t looking back to that election. They aren’t talking to me about whether or not I observed any decline with President Biden. Voters are talking about the economy in Georgia, they are talking about lack of access to healthcare in this state and they are asking me what will I do as governor to make a difference in their lives. So people are looking forward, not backwards.”

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Bottoms, who previously served as the mayor of Atlanta, refused to answer whether Biden hurt the Democrat Party by running for re-election. At the behest of many of his fellow Democrats, the former president dropped out of the race in July after his disastrous performance during the June 27, 2024, debate against the then-presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump.

Prominent Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, have dodged the question of whether they witnessed Biden’s decline by saying that their party is “looking forward” to combat Trump. Several congressional Democrats, members of the cabinet, previous White House aides were reportedly stunned by Biden’s physical and mental state in the second half of his term, though they refused to speak out publicly or stop him from running for reelection, according to Tapper and Thompson’s book.

In order to hide his decline, Biden’s aides and family members insulated him from the public eye to ensure that he could successfully run for reelection. He often did not engage with the press during public events and often had preprepared notecards that listed which reporters he should call on and how to behave during the event.

The former president held the fewest number of press conferences in comparison to his predecessors in the last century, with the exception of former Presidents Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon.

The former president’s personal physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, warned his aides that Biden may have to be placed in a wheelchair following his fall in June 2023 where he tripped over a sandbag, according to Axios, citing Tapper and Thompson’s book. He voiced his concern on how the presidency was taking a toll on the then-president’s health and urged his aides to add more rest time into his schedule.

In September 2022, Biden looked around for a deceased congresswoman at a White House conference weeks after she died in a car crash.

Biden was diagnosed with an “aggressive form” of prostate cancer that has metastasized to the bones. Medical professionals and oncologists have said that Biden definitely had the cancer while he was president as it takes time to advance to its current stage, leading to questions on whether the White House covered- up his diagnosis.

Before the 2024 election, Tapper repeatedly defended Biden against concerns about his mental capacity by suggesting he is just old. In 2020, he scolded Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara, for stating that Biden was suffering from a “cognitive decline.”