Above all, Joe Biden’s allies wanted him to demonstrate strength and energy on the debate stage to help put to rest questions about the 81-year-old Democrat’s physical and mental acuity.
But on the biggest stage in U.S. politics on Thursday night, Biden did not meet their modest expectations.
And by the end of the 90-minute showdown, the Democratic president’s allies — party strategists and rank-and-file voters alike — descended into all-out panic following a debate performance punctuated by repeated stumbles, uncomfortable pauses, and a quiet speaking style that was often difficult to understand. Publicly and privately, Democrats questioned whether the party could or should replace him as the party’s presidential nominee against the 78-year-old Republican former President Donald Trump this fall.
"I’m not the only one whose heart is breaking right now. There’s a lot of people who watched this tonight and felt terribly for Joe Biden,” former Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill said on MSNBC. “I don’t know if things can be done to fix this.”
What we can do is run a better candidate before it’s too late.
The convention isn’t for over a month, and the DNC has been very open about how they can just nominate anyone they want.
We’re only stuck with Biden because Biden and the people he put in charge of the DNC would rather risk trump than Biden step aside.
Can you imagine what it would look like if they chose someone like Jon Stewart instead? How a debate like that would have gone? A guy can dream…
The problem is that the DNC would never go for him or anyone like him, because he’s not a blatant neoliberal.
If they swap, it’ll be someone like Newsom.
Voters choose the candidate in the primary, not “the DNC”.
It’s funny how some people go on and on about the importance of democracy except when primary elections don’t go their way, at which point either the DNC rigged everything, or the DNC needs to step in to ‘fix’ the wrong choice the primary voters made. Sometimes they offer both simultaneously, because fuck consistency.
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How is it that the general response to this debate is “Trump rambled nonsensically and told conflicting lies and wants to undermine democracy, but Biden was recovering from a cold, so he’s unfit.”
Like in what world are these issues comparable?
but Biden was recovering from a cold, so he’s unfit.”
Literally haven’t seen that excuse yet…
Has he been recovering from a cold the last decade?
The biggest thing people are complaining about was Biden was a little hoarse against Trump’s booming nonsensical rambling.
I don’t care if Biden was hoarse. At Trump’s best, he made no sense, and at his worst, he was pushing terrible ideologies
It seemed a lot worse than being a little hoarse. He was conflating issues, mid sentence. And getting confused regularly in addition to seeming really feeble and not being able to answer what is asked of him. Listen if this was the first i was seeing this from the president, then i might buy this is just him mid fever. But it’s not and is expected from a man at his age. Still voting for him, but i am thinking Kamala Harris is going to have to take over the presidency before long.
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The biggest thing people are complaining about was Biden was a little hoarse
Who is saying that?
It’s not in the article you’re commenting on, and I haven’t seen a single complaint about his voice being “hoarse”.
Can you link what you’re talking about where the main complaint about Biden was he seemed hoarse?
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