President Biden’s rough performance at the CNN Presidential Debate has caused an earthquake across the media landscape, ranging from “dismal” reviews to vocal calls on the left for him to withdraw from the 2024 race.
CNN’s John King put a spotlight on the “very aggressive panic in the Democratic Party” that began in the early minutes of the debate.
“This was a game-changing debate in the sense that right now, as we speak, there is a deep, a wide and a very aggressive panic in the Democratic Party. It started minutes into the debate and it continues right now,” King said.
“It involves party strategists, it involves elected officials, it involves fundraisers. And they‘re having conversations about the president’s performance, which they think was dismal, which they think will hurt other people down the party in the ticket, and they‘re having conversations about what they should do about it.”
King’s CNN colleague Kasie Hunt similarly wrote on X, “The voice, open-mouthed look, and visual contrast between President Biden and former President Trump all have Democrats I’m talking to nearly beside themselves watching this debate.”
NBC News’ Chuck Todd admitted that Biden looked like the “caricature” conservatives have painted of him, specifically over his mental acuity. The debate came after a flood of liberal anger toward a Wall Street Journal report earlier this month that raised questions about the president’s viability.
“And there were no clips tonight, right? You saw it before your eyes,” Todd said.
“Trump’s taken control of the momentum of this debate — despite lying and living in an alternate reality — and Biden simply comes across as a somewhat dazed punching bag,” Bloomberg Opinion editor Tim O’Brien wrote on X.
MSNBC host Joy Reid, one of the faces of the network’s political coverage that unabashedly supports the president, bizarrely complained about how the Biden campaign made the fatal mistake of “putting him on the right” side of the stage.
“Why would you put him on the right?” Reid asked. “Because Biden likes to look over at the moderators and to look away. Had he been on the left, he would have been facing Donald Trump… He looked like he was looking off camera! Every decision they made exacerbated the problem!”
