It was a particularly ill-timed assertion, as it was made just hours before the public announcement that Biden has stage 4 prostate cancer.
There’s never a good time to assert, implausibly, that Joe Biden would have been just fine, physically and mentally, to serve another four years as president. But Democratic congressman James Clyburn of South Carolina — who turns 85 in July — did so yesterday morning to CNN’s Jake Tapper.
TAPPER: At a different time in that interview [with special counsel Hur], he’s asked about the 2017-2018 period, and he says during that period, his son Beau was either deployed or dying, but Beau was deployed in 2008-2009 and he died tragically in May 2015. Needless to say, even supporters of the president have heard these tapes and been alarmed by it. What was your response to them? Did you see much of that when you had meetings and interactions with President Biden during his term?
CLYBURN: No, I didn’t. The fact of the matter is, I saw Biden often, but not as often as people seem to think. I saw him. I talked to him on the telephone very often, and I never saw anything that I thought was outside of the ordinary.
…I never saw anything I thought was unusual. Did he talk as swiftly as he used to talk? No, he didn’t. Did he walk as swiftly? No, he didn’t. But that is to be expected. Those of us who reach that age, as I have, we don’t walk as often as — as fast as we used to. And I may talk as fast as I used to, but we down here in the South don’t talk all that fast anyway.
TAPPER: Well, with all due respect, sir, having interviewed you quite often, I don’t think there’s any comparison between how sharp you are and your ability to talk and answer questions and get dates right, et cetera, and what we have seen from President Biden, both in that audio, but also throughout 2023, 2024, especially on the debate stage. Do you think that Joe Biden really would have been able to perform as president all the way through January 2029, when he would be 86?
CLYBURN: Yes, I thought that back then. I still think that, but I don’t know that.
Yesterday morning turned out to be a particularly bad time to assert that Biden would have been able to perform as president all the way through January 2029, as we were hours away from learning that President Biden was diagnosed with stage 4 prostate cancer, with metastasis to the bone, and it’s “an aggressive form of the disease.”
At the end of February 2024, White House physician Kevin O’Connor declared that Biden “continues to be fit for duty and fully executes all of his responsibilities without any exceptions or accommodations.” This was well after Biden’s October 8, 2023, interview with special counsel Robert Hur.
Needless to say, some doctors are surprised that Biden went from a clean bill of health to a stage 4 metastasized cancer diagnosis within 15 months.
Dr. Chris George, the medical director of the cancer program for the Northwestern Health Network, said to Reuters:
“I would assume that the former president gets a very thorough physical every year. One of the best screening tools that we have to detect cancer is called the PSA. That’s a blood test that looks for cancer. I would be interested to know what his PSA was the last time it was checked…it’s sort of hard for me to believe that he’s had a PSA within the past year, that was normal. It’s possible. It’s definitely possible, but that would surprise me… Usually prostate cancer doesn’t, you know, go full throttle like this too often. When it does, that’s usually a bad, bad sign. That’s that’s an aggressive cancer for sure. But it it does seem odd to me. I agree.”
PSA tests are conducted with blood samples. While a PSA test is not mentioned in Biden’s February 2024 health summary, just about every other factor related to the president’s blood was declared normal, including his comprehensive metabolic panel and complete blood count.