Biden’s debate failure fuels Democratic voices calling for a change of candidate

The first debate of the 2024 presidential election has plunged Joe Biden’s re-election campaign into a deep crisis. The failure of the US president to prove that he is fit to face a second term has fueled the voices of Democrats and progressives who are calling for a replacement to face Donald Trump on November 5. Biden’s loyalists are closing ranks, but the doubts that already existed have become an outcry after his disastrous performance on Thursday in Atlanta, full of lapses, hesitations and incomplete sentences. Biden, however, appeared at a rally on Friday ready to bounce back: “I want to win the November elections,” he said. “I’m not a young man, to state the obvious. I don’t debate as well as I used to, but I know how to do this job,” he added.

With a speech that was as energetic as possible, Biden stood up to the storm of criticism received after the debate that questioned his suitability. “Every Democrat I know is saying this is bad,” Ravi Gupta of Obama’s campaign team tweeted after the debate. “Just say it publicly and start the hard work of creating space at the convention for a selection process. I will vote for a corpse over Trump, but this is a suicide mission. It might be a blessing if we got this in June and not September. But it will only be a blessing if we do something about it,” he added.

That is the great dilemma for the Democratic Party: whether to stick with the 81-year-old president, whom voters see as too old for the job, or to hastily seek an alternative candidate. Biden has the delegates necessary to secure the nomination at the Democratic National Convention, which will be held from August 19 to 22. The replacement is only viable if Biden voluntarily steps aside and an open convention is held. The last precedent, which is infamous for Democrats, is when Lyndon B. Johnson renounced re-election in 1968 and the candidates chose Hubert Humphrey at the Chicago convention, who failed at the polls against Richard Nixon. This year, the Democratic convention will be held again in Chicago.

Biden is willing to continue the battle and recover in the second face-to-face with Trump on September 10. But those two and a half months are going to be very long, with videos of the blunders from the first duel circulating at full speed on social media. Critical Democrats are hoping that someone will convince him to give up running, whether it is the first lady, his closest collaborators or former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

Jill Biden participated this Friday alongside the president in a rally in Raleigh (North Carolina) and assured that her husband is the most appropriate person for the position: “What you saw yesterday in the debate is Joe Biden, a president with his integrity and character, who told the truth, while Trump told lie after lie after lie.” Then, at a fundraising event in New York she returned to what happened on Thursday: “Let’s talk about last night’s debate, because I know it’s in your head. As Joe said earlier today, he is not a young man. And after the debate last night, he said, ‘You know, Jill, I don’t know what happened. I didn’t feel that good.’ I said, ‘Look, Joe, we’re not going to let 90 minutes define the four years you’ve been president.’

In Raleigh, Joe Biden, in better shape, but still with a cough, tried to silence the criticism between shouts of “four more years” from his followers and reading the speech on the screen. “I know I’m not a young man, to state the obvious,” he admitted. “I no longer walk as freely as before. I don’t speak as fluently as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to. But I know what I know: I know how to tell the truth, I know right from wrong, I know how to do this job, I know how to get things done. And I know what millions of Americans know: when you get knocked down, you get up,” he stressed.

The president said that Trump “broke the record for lies in a debate” and repeated, as he had told him to his face, that he has “the morals of a stray cat.” “I am here because I want to win the November elections and if we win in North Carolina [el Estado donde perdió por menos margen en 2020] “We won the elections.” The public was dedicated. “The only convicted felon on stage yesterday was Donald Trump,” he added, presenting his rival as a threat to democracy, while attendees shouted: “Lock him up!”

Obama is also betting on his former vice president. “Bad debate nights happen. Believe me, I know,” he tweeted, referring to the dialectical defeat he suffered as a candidate for reelection in 2012 in a debate against Republican Mitt Romney. “But this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary people his entire life and someone who only cares about himself. Between someone who tells the truth, who knows right from wrong and will tell it straight to the American people, and someone who lies through his teeth for his own benefit. That didn’t change last night, and that’s why there’s so much at stake in November,” he added.

Lack of an alternative candidate

The lack of a clear alternative candidate has always hindered the possibility of replacement, but names like those of the vice president, Kamala Harris, are being heard again; the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, or that of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, among others. Those three came out to give their support to Biden after the debate. “It had a weak start, but a strong finish,” Harris tried to add heat in an interview on CNN. “You don’t turn your back on someone [mala] “What kind of party does that?” Newsom told MSNBC. “Joe Biden had a bad debate night, but Donald Trump was a bad president,” Shapiro said. “I would say to all those people out there worrying right now, get to work and stop worrying.”

Pennsylvania Democratic Senator John Fetterman is even better placed than Obama to attest that face-to-face is not everything. “I refuse to join the Democratic vultures on Biden’s shoulder after the debate. “No one knows better than me that a difficult debate is not the sum total of the person and their history,” he tweeted. He won the elections in November 2022 after a disastrous debate against the Republican candidate in which he appeared with the after-effects of a stroke and he was barely able to understand the questions and put together his speech.

A current of sympathy was aroused toward Fetterman for his difficulties in the debate. Biden tries to minimize damage and repeat the phenomenon. “My father had an expression. He was saying, ‘Champion, it’s not about how many times you get knocked down. It’s how quickly you get up.’ “I’m told there’s even a song about it,” he tweeted this Friday, accompanying a snippet of his Raleigh speech with the theme Tubthumpingfrom Chumbawamba.

Many Democratic congressmen, however, fear that a bad result for Biden will drag them down, since all the representatives and a third of the senators are at risk for re-election on the same day as the presidential elections. Several have publicly expressed their concern about the bad debate in Atlanta. Even so, neither congressmen, governors, nor other officials have openly questioned Biden’s candidacy. They have been former campaign managers or people who are not in the party apparatus.

“I think there’s panic,” David Axelrod, a longtime adviser to former President Barack Obama, said on CNN. “And I think you’re going to hear discussions that I don’t know if they’ll lead anywhere, but there’s going to be discussions about whether he should continue.” “It was the worst performance in the history of televised presidential debates,” Tim Miller, a former Republican strategist turned Biden supporter, said in the press room after the debate.

The communications director for the Biden campaign, however, denied to reporters aboard Air Force One, the presidential plane, on Friday afternoon that there were any moves to replace Biden: “There are no conversations about that at all. Democratic voters elected, nominated Joe Biden. “Joe Biden is the nominee,” he stated, according to a transcript provided by the White House. Tyler admitted that Biden “didn’t have the best night on the debate stage.” “But we prefer a bad night to a candidate with a bad vision of where he wants to take the country,” he pointed out.

Media pressure

Pressure also comes from the progressive media and columnists. “Time to go, Joe,” he titled in The Atlantic Mark Leibovich. “Biden needs to step aside, for his own dignity, for the good of his party, and for the future of the country,” argued Thomas Friedman. “Joe Biden is a good man and a good president. He should withdraw from the race.” The New York TimesIn the same medium, Nobel Prize winner in Economics Paul Krugman, one of his faithful followers, also gave in: “The best president of my adult life needs to retire.”

Perhaps the most powerful blow was a harsh editorial from the New York newspaper: “To serve his country, President Biden should abandon the electoral race,” it headlined. “In Thursday’s debate, the president needed to convince the American public that he was up to the formidable demands of the office he aspires to hold for another term. However, voters cannot be expected to ignore what was evident: Biden is not the man he was four years ago,” he said. “There are Democratic leaders better equipped to present clear, compelling and forceful alternatives to a second Trump presidency. “There is no reason for the party to risk the country’s stability and security by forcing voters to choose between Mr. Trump’s shortcomings and Mr. Biden’s,” he added.

When Biden launched his run for the Democratic nomination in 2020, he met with the editorial board of the New York Times, that I didn’t bet on him. The newspaper recommended two candidates as the best options for the presidency: Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar. In response, Biden He tweeted a video that went viral with the security guard who had accompanied him in the elevator on his visit to the newsroom: “Honored to have gained Jacquelyn’s support.” Exactly one year after that tweet, Biden was sworn in as president of the United States after defeating his Democratic rivals, first, and then Donald Trump. Biden wants history to repeat itself.

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