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- President Joe Biden struggled in the first debate of 2024.
- Biden pushed for the earliest major debate in history.
- After the president's performance, concerns about his age are going to come roaring back.
President Joe Biden wanted the earliest major presidential debate in history. He pushed for an empty room, muted mics, and Fox News on the sideline. He got everything he desired.
Biden turned in a performance so disastrous that prominent Democrats are questioning if the president can even go on.
"I think there was a sense of shock actually on how he came out at the beginning of this debate," former senior Obama White House advisor David Axelrod said on CNN. "How his voice sounded — he seemed a little disoriented at the beginning of the debate. He did get stronger as the debate went on, but by that time, I think the panic had set in."
Axelrod and other Democrats tried to give the president credit for landing a few jabs, but their concerns jumped off the page after months of prominent leaders dismissing discussion of Biden's continued standing as the oldest president in history.
"It was a really disappointing debate performance from Joe Biden," Kate Beddingfield, Biden's former White House communications direction, said shortly after Axelrod. "I don't think there's any other way to slice it. His biggest issue was to prove to the American people that he had the energy, the stamina — and he didn't do that."
Van Jones seemed just beside himself.
"That was painful. I loved Joe Biden, I worked for Joe Biden," Jones said. "He did not do well at all."
Even Vice President Kamala Harris admitted that the president struggled.
"Yes there was a slow start, but it was a strong finish," Harris told CNN anchor Anderson Cooper following the debate.
At best, Biden fumbled a chance to jolt his campaign that is within shouting distance in some key battleground states but has little room for error. At worst, his raspy voice and rambling answers may be the final meaningful words of a president who warns that if he loses to former President Donald Trump that the American experiment as we know it will cease.
Major Democrats helped ensure that Biden avoided any serious primary challenge. No recent incumbent president has debate primary challengers. But no recent incumbent was also the oldest president in the nation's history. And in Biden's own view, no challenger posed such a fundamental risk to the nation as Trump.
One former White House aide told Politico that Biden's performance was "terrible."
Special counsel Robert Hur ripped the Band-Aid off earlier this year when he said that he decided not to charge Biden because a jury would find the nation's leader to be a "well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory." Biden quieted some of those doubts with a rousing State of the Union that repeatedly tore into predecessor in everything but his name.
But as Thursday's debate unfolded, those doubts came roaring back.
"There's no way I'd send my boss out on national TV in that condition," Michael Hardaway, a former aide to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries wrote on X. "There's 0 upside to Joe Biden doing any of these."
Quentin James, a co-founder of the Collective PAC, an organization dedicated to Black voters, told The New York Times that he was surprised at how bad Biden's voice was.
"Compared to the State of the Union and on the campaign trail, I'm wondering if they did too much debate prep," James, who is supportive of Biden, told The Times. "There's very little range. Him being hoarse is hurting his performance."
Former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang also weighed in on X near the end of the debate. "Guys, the Dems should nominate someone else - before it's too late. #swapJoeout," he wrote.
Multiple outlets reported that Biden had a cold, but as Politico Playbook author Eugene Daniels pointed out the president's illness wasn't mentioned before the debate.
Biden relishes in being counted out. He even spoke to Hur about President Obama didn't think he would be the best Democrat to run in 2016. Obama's former campaign manager David Plouffe reportedly cautioned Biden that he didn't want to end his decades-long career in public service with a distant finish in the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses.
Biden got the last laugh, incredibly overcoming a terrible finish in the Iowa caucuses to win not just the Democratic nomination but the presidency itself.
A different Obama aide, David Axelrod, reportedly got under Biden's skin this year after expressing concerns about the president's age. There will now likely Democrats that say he should have listened.
But it won't be a bad caucus result that does him in. It may just be a terrible debate in a mostly empty room on Georgia Tech's campus.
Biden was already saddled with a horrendous approval rating. Now, more stories about his biggest vulnerability, his age, are almost certainly coming.