Former President Joe Biden appeared to linger on stage, uncertain of what he should do next, at the opening ceremony of former President Barack Obama’s new library and center in Chicago.
As the dedication ceremony wrapped up on Thursday in Chicago, Biden was seen drifting back toward the stage while former President Barack Obama and former first lady Jill Biden exited. Video showed Biden lowering his sunglasses, looking into the crowd and asking, “Where’s my granddaughter?” A person familiar with the situation told Fox News that Biden was looking for his granddaughter, who was seated in the audience.
Credit: Barack Obama via YouTube
But after Biden’s disastrous final year in office, his frequent verbal stumbles and apparent confusion can no longer be viewed in isolation. The increasing number and frequency of such stumbles — both cognitive and physical — caused many to question over whether he was even capable of serving another term.
While the Obama Center incident alone was not unique, it reflected the kind of public episode that had dogged Biden throughout the final stretch of his presidency and later became central to the debate over his eventually-abandoned re-election campaign.
Those concerns, in spite of the administrations claims to the contrary, were not based only on viral videos or partisan commentary. A 2024 Daily Wire analysis of official White House transcript corrections found that Biden’s speaking errors doubled in the 12 months leading up to his June 27 debate against Donald Trump. The analysis reviewed nearly 400 official “speeches and remarks” transcripts, where White House staff and stenographers crossed out incorrect words or inserted corrected language in brackets.
According to the analysis, the White House corrected 33 Biden errors in June 2023, a rate of 3.2 errors per 10,000 words. By May 2024, staff made 51 corrections, producing a rate of 7.2 errors per 10,000 words after Biden spoke roughly 70,000 words that month. The outlet noted that Biden spoke only about half his usual number of words in official remarks in June before the debate brought new scrutiny to his public performance.
The corrections included misstated numbers, names, dates, and factual references. Biden mixed up billions and millions, debt and deficit, and even basic dates. In one widely circulated example after the debate, Biden attempted to reassure supporters that he would remain in the race and defeat Trump, saying, “I will beat him again in 2020.”
A second Daily Wire analysis found that Biden’s tendency to stop mid-sentence, restart, correct himself, or drift into tangents appeared twice as frequently as it had when he was vice president. That analysis reviewed thousands of official transcripts across 11 years and found that Biden’s fragmented speaking patterns increased sharply between the end of his vice presidency in 2017 and the beginning of his presidency in 2021, then only became more pronounced during his term.
Concerns about his mental acuity became more difficult to separate from Biden’s public image after his June 2024 debate against Trump, which intensified scrutiny of both his age and public performance. Less than a month later, Biden ended his re-election campaign.
The Chicago video was a brief episode at the end of a public ceremony. But it follows the same pattern that made Biden’s public appearances a political liability during the 2024 campaign, as his verbal missteps and moments of confusion became harder to ignore.
