President Joe Biden wanted the earliest major presidential debate in history. He pushed for an empty room, muted mics, and Fox News on the sidelines. He got everything he desired.
Biden turned in a performance so disastrous that it prompted prominent Democrats to question if he should be the party's nominee.
"I think there was a sense of shock actually on how he came out at the beginning of this debate," David Axelrod, a former senior Obama White House advisor, 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 they openly voiced their concerns after spending months dismissing concerns about Biden's status as the oldest president in history.
"It was a really disappointing debate performance from Joe Biden," Kate Bedingfield, Biden's former White House communications director, said on CNN. "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, another CNN commentator, seemed 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 Anderson Cooper following the debate.
At best, Biden fumbled a chance to jolt his campaign — recent polls suggest he's within shouting distance of Trump in some key battleground states, but he has little room for error. At worst, his raspy voice and rambling answers may be the final meaningful words of a president who has warned that if he loses to former President Donald Trump, the American experiment as we know it will come to an end.
Major Democrats helped ensure that Biden avoided any serious primary challenge, so he didn't face a debate before this one. (No recent incumbent president has debated primary challengers, but as the oldest president in the nation's history, Biden may have benefited from the practice.) 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."
Earlier this year, Robert Hur, the special counsel who led an investigation into whether Biden improperly stored documents, caused consternation 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 in which he repeatedly tore into his predecessor without uttering 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 cofounder of the Collective PAC, an organization that represents the interests of 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."
Andrew Yang, a Democratic candidate in the 2020 presidential primaries, 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 the Politico Playbook author Eugene Daniels pointed out, the president's illness wasn't mentioned before the debate.
Biden relishes being the underdog. In interviews with Hur, he even said that President Obama didn't think he would be the best Democrat to run in 2016. David Plouffe, Obama's former campaign manager, reportedly cautioned Biden that he didn't want to end his decadeslong career in public service with a distant finish in the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses.
Biden got the last laugh, overcoming a terrible finish in the Iowa caucuses to win not just the Democratic nomination but the presidency itself.
Axelrod reportedly got under Biden's skin this year after expressing concerns about his age. Now, many Democrats are publicly saying the same thing.
This time, 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 horrendous approval ratings. Now, more stories about his biggest vulnerability, his age, are almost certainly coming.
