The Problem in Plain Sight

Top Democrats are circling the wagons around President Biden with a simple response to his disastrous debate performance: It was just one bad night, and the freakout over his candidacy is overblown.

“Following Thursday night’s debate, the beltway class is counting Joe Biden out,” Biden’s campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, wrote in a memo circulated over the weekend that said the president’s supporters are fired up and focused on beating Trump.

The campaign and Biden’s surrogates are trying to portray the panic over Biden’s age, which ratcheted up after the 81-year-old president struggled to speak coherently and finish sentences on Thursday night, as inside-the-beltway chatter. But it’s actually the opposite. Polling and interviews have shown that voters around the country have long harbored deep reservations about Biden’s age, while Democratic power players in Washington have been unwilling to talk openly about them.

Now, some Democrats are beginning to warn the campaign not to discount those worries and to instead address them honestly and openly.

“As someone who’s on the local level, that talks with people every single day who have all types of backgrounds, there’s been an overriding concern about President Biden’s health and ability to deliver,” said Walt Maddox, who has served as the Democratic mayor of Tuscaloosa for nearly 20 years. “Regardless of whether that’s accurate or not, Thursday night’s debate only reinforced that perception.”

“People have concerns,” said Maddox, who was the Democratic nominee for governor of Alabama in 2018, “and I think to try to ask voters to move on from those concerns would not be a wise course of action.”