Mike Allen, co-founder of Axios, wrote a piece this morning echoing what he says Democrats believe about last night’s debate, saying:
This is history. It’ll be talked about for generations. It will replace Richard Nixon sweating in 1960 as the most disastrous performance in a televised debate. And that’s the view of Democrats.
Yep, that’s probably an accurate assessment of the debate. It was disastrous.
Allen writes:
President Biden’s debate performance triggered a meltdown of epic proportions last night, uniting Democrats of all stripes — optimists and bedwetters — in a state of unprecedented panic, Axios’ Zachary Basu, Alex Thompson and Hans Nichols write.
On the biggest stage in politics — with rules and a date specifically requested by the Biden campaign — Biden amplified voters’ gravest fears.
This is history. It’ll be talked about for generations. It will replace Richard Nixon sweating in 1960 as the most disastrous performance in a televised debate. And that’s the view of Democrats.
Yes, Biden had some good moments. Yes, he can blame his soft, sandy voice on a cold. But you can’t spin away how old he looked, how haltingly he spoke, how often he tripped over words.
Biden is 81 and former President Trump turned 78 this month. The age difference looked much vaster.
Biden’s obvious frailty, rambling answers and constant gaffes led N.Y. Times columnist Nick Kristof to declare: “I hope he reviews his debate performance Thursday evening and withdraws from the race, throwing the choice of a Democratic nominee to the convention in August.”
A “disaster,” a former Biden administration official called it.
“It’s sad. But it also makes me so mad to think of all the smart people lying and trying to make this work,” a former Biden White House official told us.
“Catastrophe … Unimaginably bad … It’s Waterloo,” an influential Democratic campaign veteran texted me during the debate.
“DEFCON 1 moment,” David Plouffe, former President Obama’s campaign manager, said on MSNBC. “The concern level is quite high.”
It was the Biden campaign that pushed for the earliest general-election debate in presidential history. Trump just accepted the terms CNN had hammered out with Biden’s camp — including no studio audience, and mikes that muted when it was the other guy’s turn.
Biden “was over-prepared and relying on minutiae when all that mattered was vigor and energy,” a person in the president’s orbit told Axios. “They prepared him for the wrong debate. He was over-prepared when what he needed was rest. It’s confounding.”
I’ve never seen anything like this in the Democrat Party. They’ve always had the ability to support their candidate through thick and thin. And the news media would just ignore when their candidate screwed up, just like they ignored all of the dementia we saw from Biden in the run up to the election in 2020.
But that day is clearly over.