Before Thursday night, many Americans had expressed concerns about Joe Biden’s age and suitability for office. To say that this debate did not allay those concerns is an understatement.
The president, who is 81 years old, came to the debate with the bar set very low and stumbled. He was flat. He rambled. It wasn’t clear.
About halfway through the debate, Biden’s campaign told reporters that the president had a cold, in an attempt to explain his hoarse voice. Maybe so, but it also sounded like an excuse.
For 90 minutes, Joe Biden was on the ropes. Particularly early in the evening, some of his answers made no sense. He ended one response by saying, “We have finally defeated Medicare,” an odd reference to the government-run health care program for the elderly.
Biden’s own former communications director, Kate Bedingfield, spoke on CNN immediately after the debate, and was clear: “There is no doubt that it was not a good debate for Joe Biden.”
Bedingfield said that His biggest challenge was to prove that he had the energy and staminaand did not do it.
As the debate progressed, like a boxer on the ropes, Biden began landing big punches on his opponent in an attempt to turn the tide. Some of those blows were successful, prompting angry responses from the former president.
The fact that the first topics discussed were the economy and immigration, issues on which Americans trust Donald Trump more according to polls, only made the problem worse for the president.
“I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence, and I don’t think he does either,” Trump joked after another response from Biden. That phrase may have summed up the night.
A different candidate?
This is the most premature debate in modern American history, in part because the Biden team wanted it that way. One reason is that They wanted to divert attention to Trump earlier in the campaign, hoping to remind American voters of the chaotic nature of his presidency.
But after this debate there will be more talk about Biden’s performance than that of the former president.
Another reason Biden’s team may have wanted an early debate is that it would give their candidate more time to recover from a weak performance. This may be what comforts you after this Thursday night.
The Democrats have their convention in August, where they will be able to offer a more structured vision of what a second Biden term would look like for Americans.
There is another debate scheduled for September.which – if celebrated – will be fresher in the minds of Americans when they head to the polls in November.
That may be weak comfort to Democrats, though, who may be wondering whether a second chance against Trump on stage will turn out differently for their nominee. And some, right now, may be thinking about how to get a different candidate at their August convention.
Panic in the ranks of the Democrats
If one thing has become clear on Thursday night, it is that Biden’s performance in the debate set off alarm bells in the Democratic Party.
On the main American networks, analysts after the face-to-face have focused on the “panic” that ran through the Democratic ranks due to Biden’s “catastrophic” performance, without the falsehoods and inaccuracies that Trump repeated during the debate being able to counteract the bad impression left by the president.
“This was a game-changing debate in the sense that right now, as we speak, there is a deep, broad and very aggressive panic in the Democratic Party,” said veteran CNN national correspondent John King.
“(The panic) started minutes after the debate and continues now. It involves party strategists, elected officials, fundraisers… and they are having conversations about the president’s performance, which they find depressing,” King said.
“Some of those conversations include ‘Should we go to the White House and ask the president to step aside?’Other conversations revolve around: ‘Should prominent Democrats make that call public because they feel this debate was so terrible?’” the CNN journalist explained.
For his part, political commentator David Axelrod said Biden beat Trump on substance, but admitted: “There will be discussions about whether he [Biden] I should continue.”
According to analysts, the only way for Joe Biden not to be his party’s candidate in the November elections would be for the president himself to withdraw from the race before the Democratic Convention in August, which must officially choose the party’s candidate, something that at this point seems unlikely.
*With additional information from the BBC News Mundo editorial staff
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