Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) on Jill Biden’s recent comments about President Joe Biden’s debate performance in the 2024 election: <\/p>\n
KASIE HUNT, CNN ANCHOR: Congressman, I do want to start with you, actually, because, of course, the president decided he was going to run for re-election after the wins in the 2022 midterm elections. Now we’re hearing this from Jill Biden. Is it productive for her to be out there saying these things at this point, in your view? REP. ADAM SMITH (D-WA): I don’t think it’s terribly productive, and it’s sad, and it’s dishonest. I mean, just think of the two sentences. She said, I saw him on the debate stage. I thought he was having a stroke. And then in the next breath, she says, no, I didn’t see any evidence of cognitive decline. Come on. I mean, and this is something that was a huge problem for my party. I mean, it was very clear, probably a couple years out, that Joe Biden was not going to be a credible candidate for president because of his age and declining health. To my mind, that’s not even debatable. And yet, Jill and the family and a whole lot of his advisers around him, for whatever reason, dug in and said, we’re going to jam him forward. And we’ve paid a terrible, terrible price for that. And the final point on this is every one of us Democrats out there who saw that Biden was going to run, and there was no stopping him, we had to try and defend it, which undermined our credibility as individuals and our credibility as a party. So it really weakened us in 2024. They should have seen it. They just should have seen it. And the only thing I want to hear from Jill Biden is, I’m sorry. We should have said something sooner.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n