President Joe Biden went into the first presidential debate Thursday night with one main task: prove to America that, at 81-years-old, he’s still up to the job.
According to many members of his party, he failed spectacularly.
The President, who rarely takes questions from the media or speaks off the cuff, sounded hoarse from the start. His campaign blamed a cold, but other stumbles were harder to write off. At one point, Biden bragged “we finally beat Medicare,” a flub which Trump immediately hit him on. He struggled to finish some sentences coherently. Democrats were alarmed.
“It was a really disappointing debate performance from Joe Biden,” said Kate Bedingfield, Biden’s former White House communications director, on CNN. “I don’t think there’s any other way to slice it. His biggest issue that he had to prove to the American people was that he had the energy, had the stamina. And he didn’t do that.”
On the same panel, former Obama senior adviser David Axelrod went even further.
“I think the panic had set in,” Axelrod said. “There are gonna be discussions about whether he should continue.”
A CNN flash poll found that 67 percent of debate watchers said Trump won the debate, while 33 percent thought Biden performed better. The poll also found only 14 percent had “a lot” of confidence in Biden’s ability to lead the county compared to 36 percent in Trump’s.
Biden, however, did not appear convinced of his poor performance. At a brief stop at a Waffle House in Atlanta, he said, “I thought we did well.”
According to NBC News, a Biden aide said the president’s initial performance was “not an ideal start,” but that there was “no mass panic.” But behind a cloak of anonymity, some powerful Democrats were sounding the alarm. In an Axios report, several House Democrats also expressed disbelief about the president’s performance. “We’re going to lose 20 seats in the House if this is what goes on,” one said.
Democratic operatives were horrified, too. “Poor guy needs a tea,” said one anonymous strategist in a text to Politico. “Maybe a whiskey.”
In polls before debate night, voters had expressed serious concerns about the President’s age. A Wall Street Journal report previously suggested that, behind closed doors, he seems to be slipping. Until this point, the White House has pushed back aggressively on that narrative and few prominent Democrats have gone on record with their concerns.
Thursday night may have changed that.
Even Vice President Kamala Harris acknowledged that Biden’s performance could have been better. “There was a slow start,” she said, before spinning the night in his favor, adding, “But it was a strong finish.”
The mood among Democrats online wasn’t any rosier.
Former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julián Castro, who invoked concerns about Biden’s age when the two faced off during the 2020 primary debates, didn’t hold back on Thursday night, either.
“Biden had a very low bar going into the debate and failed to clear even that bar,” Castro posted on X, the site formerly known as Twitter. “He seemed unprepared, lost, and not strong enough to parry effectively with Trump, who lies constantly.”
Former Obama adviser Ben Rhodes lamented the debate on X as well, posting, “Just think about what that debate looked like to people and leaders around the world.”
“Telling people they didn’t see what they saw is not the way to respond to this,” he added.
