President Joe Biden isn't giving an interview before Sunday's Super Bowl because his staff does not have confidence in how he will look to the American public, Democrat political strategist James Carville said Saturday.
"Your polling is averaging, three points down in a two-way [race], the biggest television audience, not even close, and you get a chance to do a 20-, 25-minute interview on that day and you don't do it, that's a sign your staff doesn't have much confidence in you," Carville said on CNN.
"There's no other way to read this," he added. "He's not going to do debates. He is old. I know what it is because I'm almost as old as he is. It's never going to get better. Today is the youngest you'll ever be the rest of your life."
Biden did the Super Bowl pregame interviews in 2021, with CBS, and 2022, with NBC, but opted out in 2023, when Fox was hosting the game. This year's game will be broadcast by CBS.
Former President Donald Trump also skipped one of the pregame interviews while he was in office, as Fox News was not broadcasting the game that year, NBC News reported.
The first presidential pregame interview was in 2004 when then-President George W. Bush spoke with CBS News.
Meanwhile, Carville said that as the Democratic Party has chosen to go through with Biden's reelection, party members and those working with the campaign, need to be told what Biden will or will not do to work around the issue of his age and the questions that were raised in special counsel Robert Hur's report.
"I thought the Super Bowl interview was telling," said Carville. "I also thought the fact the documents he took were about Afghanistan. I think he's obsessed. I do think the best thing he's ever done as president and maybe the best thing any president has done is just get out of Afghanistan … he just wanted people to know that was his view and he never was for that."
Carville also Saturday said it is not too late for the party to put up a potential nominee for the White House.
"It's never too late," he said. "If you had a nominee and the nominee dropped dead the last week of October you'd have some mechanism to have a replacement. It would be late to do it and a lot of chaos. Lyndon Johnson dropped out in March of 1968 and we had a nominee."
But there is no "convincing" to be done with the public on Biden's age, said Carville, because "the public knows he's old and he is old."
Carville further questioned Attorney General Merrick Garland's decision to appoint Hur as the special counsel to investigate Biden in connection with the improper storage of hidden documents.
"This guy wasn't just a Republican, he was about as far out there partisan Republican as you can be," said Carville. "Why we appointed him I have no idea. Merrick Garland's philosophy, I think, is that we'll appoint somebody so bad we'll get credit for appointing someone good."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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