President Joe Biden’s aides have defended his debate performance, treating it as an unimportant one-off in a long campaign.
According to The New York Times, the president’s aides are trying to cast Biden’s performance — branded by many as a disaster — as insignificant in the long run.
Jen O’Malley Dillon, Biden’s top campaign strategist, said a potential drop in the polls would be due to an “overblown media narrative,” according to the outlet.
Quentin Fulks, the president’s deputy campaign manager, told staff that “nothing fundamentally changed about this election” after the debate, per The Times.
Many disagree. Though Biden and Trump both performed poorly, the consensus was that the former lost.
This was largely due to his confusing ramblings and apparent struggle to keep track of his answers, which led commentators to question whether the 81-year-old was too old for the job.
Ironically, Biden’s aides also appeared to blame the president’s age when discussing his debate performance with Axios. The unnamed staff members said he struggles to function outside a six-hour window between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.
Biden’s defense could be used against him
Thomas Gift, an associate professor of political science at University College London, told Business Insider that Biden’s defense could be used against him later in the campaign.
“Trying to convince Americans that the president is fine from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. is hardly reassuring. This isn’t a part-time job at McDonald’s. It’s the presidency of the United States,” Gift said, adding that domestic and foreign crises don’t unfold “only during standard business hours.”
Biden echoed his aides’ comments during a speech in Raleigh on Friday, telling the crowd that he doesn’t speak or debate “as well as I used to.”
“But I know what I do know — I know how to tell the truth … I know right from wrong. And I know how to do this job. I know how to get things done. And I know, like millions of Americans know, when you get knocked down, you get back up,” he said.
Biden’s decision to highlight the criticism of his age could “backfire,” according to Gift, who said it could become even more prominent in voters’ minds.
“Lots of Americans might reasonably ask: what else doesn’t Biden do as well as he used to? Interact with foreign leaders as well as he used to? Negotiate with Congress as well as he used to? Make decisions about war and peace as well as he used to?” Gift said.
As BI’s Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert and Erin Snodgrass previously noted, Biden is using a Trumpian strategy: asking voters not to count him out despite clear flaws in his campaign.
Andrew Payne, an author and foreign policy expert, told BI that the Biden campaign may also regret framing the debate as a one-off because the president may struggle at future campaign events.
“By framing Biden’s performance as a ‘blip,’ campaign surrogates are trying to reset expectations. This carries some risk if the president again fails to meet them when he next goes toe-to-toe with Donald Trump,” said Payne, author of “War on the Ballot: How the Election Cycle Shapes Presidential Decision-Making in War.”
Payne pointed out that the “blip” narrative could have some truth to it, especially as he was “noticeably more assured in his public comments the day after the debate.”
Gift isn’t convinced, saying there’s little evidence to suggest that Biden will overcome his issues with public speaking.
“It’s hard for Biden’s team to characterize the debate as ‘just a blip’ when the White House has spent much of the last four years shielding him from public view, with the exception of pre-written speeches read from a teleprompter,” Gift said.
“He’s done virtually no adversarial interviews, and his number of press conferences with Q&A have been far fewer than his predecessors,” he added.
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