Turmoil and uncertainty continued to swirl around the Democratic Party as it seeks to reassure itself following Thursday night’s calamitous presidential debate performance by Joe Biden.
The US president spent Sunday with his family at Camp David after acknowledging the alarmed reaction to his 90-minute debacle against Donald Trump, while predictably vowing to continue. “It wasn’t my best debate. I understand the concern. I get it. But I’m going to be fighting harder,” he told financial donors at an engagement on Saturday in Red Bank, New Jersey.
In public, senior Democratic officials sought to circle the wagons around their candidate and to deflect from the renewed focus on his age and a fear that declining faculties mean he is no longer the political force that he was when he campaigned four years ago.
A CBS poll asking whether both candidates possessed the “mental and cognitive health to serve as president” found that while 50 per cent opined that Donald Trump “does not”, 72 per cent now believe that Joe Biden does not.
“Well, what do they think about the other guy?” Democrat veteran Nancy Pelosi said on a Sunday morning television interview with CNN when asked about that figure.
She added: “Do they think he has the integrity to be president after that performance? Let us not make a judgment about a presidency on one debate. Let’s talk about what it means to people in their lives – and that is why you are not seeing much changed in the polls on this. The difference between Joe Biden and the former president is so clear. If you are a woman and you care about your reproductive freedom and health – and women do – you see a complete difference in the right to choose with Joe Biden and a ban on abortion with the other guy.”
Pelosi, herself 84, proceeded to deliver a succinct package of Biden’s accomplishments over his four-year term – something the president himself glaringly failed to do over the course of the debate in Atlanta. His campaign team sought to end the intense speculation that he should step down and a dramatic change of nomination is imminent.
“First of all, Joe Biden is going to be the Democratic nominee, period. Voters voted. He won overwhelmingly,” Rob Flaherty, his deputy campaign manager, said over the weekend.
“And if he was to drop out, it would lead to weeks of chaos, internal food fighting, and a bunch of candidates who limp into a brutal floor fight at the convention, all while Donald Trump has time to speak to American voters uncontested,” he added.
But the calls for Mr Biden to voluntarily relinquish his position are significant. A series of august political commentators, including Biden’s friend, the veteran New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, have publicly called on him to make way for a younger party colleague.
New Yorker editor David Remnick wrote a comment piece which stated that Biden’s refusal to make way will not “merely risk his legacy – it risks the election and, most important, puts in peril the very issues and principles that Biden has framed as central to his presidency and essential to the future”.
Democratic polling groups worked over the weekend gauging whether the dismayed international reaction corresponds with the thinking of their grassroots support base. There is also a disquiet among Democrats over the fact that intense scrutiny of Biden’s capacity to function has meant virtually no condemnation of the 30-plus falsehoods which Trump issued unchecked over the course of a debate which he clearly won.
“I am terrified that this man can lie for 90 minutes and show that he does not have a moral compass at all,” said Vermont representative Becca Balint. “That is what is terrifying me this morning. That’s all I have to say.”
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is expected to issue a judgment on the immunity claims of Donald Trump’s legal team on Monday.
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