On Tuesday’s broadcast of NewsNation’s “On Balance,” Rep. Ami Bera (D-CA) said that during Joe Biden’s presidency, there was a lot accomplished on foreign policy, but “we can go back in hindsight and say, maybe it wasn’t the President that was doing this and maybe we should have asked questions.”
Host Leland Vittert asked, “When Democrats are seen as acting in the interests of their party, not in the interests of the country, how do you have to atone for that for the American people to trust Democrats at all?”
Bera answered, “So, I think we passed significant legislation under the Biden administration. Now, did President Biden have health issues, was he in decline? In hindsight, that’s 20/20.”
Vittert then cut in to say, “In hindsight? We all saw it.”
Bera responded, “No. But, again, we passed significant legislation. We saw it on television in that debate, obviously, folks started to come out, but we can’t cover that up. We lost that election. That’s on us. We’ve got to go to the American people and say, here’s what we would do.”
Vittert followed up, “But don’t you have to go back to the American people — and I say this because there [were] a lot of us who knew before the debate, you’re a doctor, you watched him say in 2022, I have cancer, maybe he actually did, but it was written off as a gaffe. You saw him talk to a dead congresswoman after watching a video about her in tribute to her. We all saw the reduced schedule. We all saw the short stairs on Air Force One. A lot of people said, hey, look, that’s what my mother went through in early onset dementia, on and on and on and on. In retrospect, don’t you have to say to the American people, we screwed up by not acknowledging what everyone saw, we screwed up not putting the country first and putting party first?”
Bera answered, “I’d separate party, I look at the policy that we were able to pass, what we were able to do in the foreign policy space, re-establishing alliances. We were doing a lot. Now, was that Joe Biden or was that the people around him?”
Vittert then cut in to ask if it was a politburo.
Bera responded, “No, I don’t think that was a politburo. But I think he had really strong folks around him. Now, yes, we can go back in hindsight and say, maybe it wasn’t the President that was doing this and maybe we should have asked questions. Dean Phillips did that, and kudos to Dean Phillips, he saw something that we didn’t. And I think Dean deserves credit for it.”
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