CNN hosts sounded the alarm on President Joe Biden‘s performance in the first presidential debate against former President Donald Trump, with one reporting that there is panic spreading in the Democratic Party.
CNN’s John King, in the first comments on the network after the debate concluded, called it a “game-changing debate” but for all the wrong reasons for Biden.
“This was a game-changing debate in the sense that right now, as we speak, there is a wide and a very aggressive panic in the Democratic Party,” King said. “It involves party strategists, it involves elected officials, it involves fundraisers. And they’re having conversations about the president’s performance, which 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.”
“Some of those conversations include ‘Should we go to the White House and ask the president to step aside?’ Others are about, should prominent Democrats go public with that call because they feel this debate was so terrible,” he added.
Former Obama adviser David Axelrod said that Biden’s performance shocked Democrats as to how he sounds, and he said he believes there will be “discussions” on whether to replace Biden.
“There is a feeling – I think there was a sense of shock actually at how he came out at the beginning of this debate, how his voice sounded. He seemed a little disoriented – he did get stronger as the debate went on but by that time, I think the panic had set in,” Axelrod said. “And I think you‘re going to hear discussions that I don‘t know will lead to anything, but there is going to be discussion about whether he should continue.”
CNN commentator Van Jones said that Biden “failed” to restore confidence and entertained replacing Biden on the Democratic ticket.
“I just want to speak for my heart, I love that guy. He’s a good man, he loves his country, He‘s doing the best that he can, but he had a test to meet tonight to restore the confidence of the country and of the base, and he failed to do that,” Jones said.
“And I think there‘s a lot of people who are going to want to see him consider taking a different course now. We‘re still far from our convention, and there is time for this party to figure out a different way forward if he will allow us to do that,” Jones added. “That was not what we needed from Joe Biden and it’s personally painful for a lot of people. It‘s not just panic, it’s pain of what we saw tonight.”
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Jones, who worked in the Obama White House, later said that neither Trump nor Biden is inspiring confidence.
“We have a problem as a country now, and this might be an opportunity for people to come together and figure this out, because neither one of those people right now are inspiring the confidence that they should inspire, that they can do the job in a way that would be good for the country,” Jones said.
