President Biden once pitied an older senator who was showing early signs of Parkinson’s disease, saying the “poor son of a bitch” was no longer up to the job.
Biden, now 81, made the cutting remark in the mid-1990s when asked about Rhode Island Sen. Claiborne Pell, who was then in his late-70s, far younger than the oldest-ever president is now, former White House reporter Tom Galvin recalled in an op-ed for Politico.
“I asked Biden if given Pell’s diminished capacity, he’d make a move to replace him,” Galvin recalled of Biden’s ambitions to oust Pell as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The reporter said Biden replied, “That poor son of a bitch.”
“Pell was no longer up for the job, he told me, but like so many of his elderly colleagues, Pell couldn’t imagine a life outside Congress,” Galvin said of Biden, who was then the senator for Delaware.
The reporter, who now works as a communications strategist, said he was “stunned” by Biden’s remarks, which he believes took place after then-President Bill Clinton’s 1994 State of the Union address.
However, he didn’t print them because at the time he had “no intention of writing about Pell,” who would in 1995 confirm being diagnosed with Parkinson’s.
Pell ended up losing the Foreign Relations Committee chair when Republicans seized the Senate later in 1994. After serving six terms in the Senate, his illness eventually forced him to retire in early 1997.
Biden’s apparent sympathy for Pell’s heath emerged as the president, too, faces mounting calls to give up his 2024 re-election campaign.
The commander-in-chief, who on Wednesday was diagnosed with COVID, has sparked widespread panic among Democrats about his cognitive fitness ever since his rambling June 27 debate performance.
The White House initially hid the fact that he had been seen by a Parkinson’s specialist, later claiming it was part of a regular checkup.
New York-based neurologist Dr. Tom Pitts is among experts to have raised the alarm, saying the president exhibits such “classic features of neurodegeneration” he “could have diagnosed him from across the mall.”
A defiant Biden has so far resisted calls to drop out of the race, while the White House has insisted he doesn’t need a fresh medical exam.