“Joe Biden is a person. Take away his title, he is someone who has dealt with tragedy,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Tuesday. “He is someone who has confronted that head on. He is someone who knows how to get back up once you’ve been knocked down.”
This effort to cast the debate as a “bad day” and the president as a “comeback kid” reflects an increasingly evident disconnect between Biden’s inner circle and many in the Democratic Party. A growing number of Democrats view Biden’s performance, when he sometimes struggled to complete his sentences, as reflecting a serious problem for the party, not an episode in his history of overcoming adversity.
And they stress the high stakes.
“Instead of reassuring voters, the President failed to effectively defend his many accomplishments and expose Trump’s many lies,” Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas), who became the first Democratic lawmaker to call for Biden to step aside Tuesday, said in a statement. “President Biden saved our democracy by delivering us from [former president Donald] Trump in 2020. He must not deliver us to Trump in 2024.”
Overcoming adversity has long been at the heart of Biden’s identity. His Senate career began with the death of his wife and daughter in a 1972 car accident, and his son Beau died in 2015. Biden lost his first two bids for the presidency, was pushed aside in 2016, and began the 2020 primaries with brutal losses in Iowa and New Hampshire.
The push to fit Biden’s current challenge into his history of overcoming hardship comes as the president’s aides are trying to hold the line against criticism from influential voices that have described his candidacy as beyond redemption.
Influential publications, liberal commentators and former elected officials are calling on him to withdraw from the presidential the race after failing to put to rest concerns over his age and mental acuity. No prominent Democratic officeholders have called on him to pull out, but anxious lawmakers are having conversations behind closed doors about whether Biden’s continued candidacy risks facilitating Democrats’ worst nightmare: the return of Trump to the White House.
Even some longtime Biden allies warn that the current crisis is unlike any of the tragedies he has overcome in the past. Former senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who served alongside Biden for more than 20 years, said that while Biden’s life of public service has been admirable, he needs to make the “unselfish” decision to step aside.
“Saving American democracy is more important than fealty to any one person,” Harkin said in a text message. “I hope his wife and family convince him to do the unselfish, courageous thing and announce his retirement from government effective next January and release his delegates.”
Rather than encouraging him to retire, Biden’s family members have been some of the most stalwart advocates of him remaining in the race for a second term, using a recent two-day retreat in Camp David to bolster his spirits and showcase their own resolve.
These family members, along with Biden’s close-knit inner circle of advisers, have watched him overcome trials over the years and have come to mirror his self-confidence, according to people familiar with their thinking. At Biden’s family gathering at Camp David, the president was encouraged to stay the course by a group of people he has typically turned to when facing political or personal challenges, according to two people familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
“They have lived through so much worse that they’re able to have that perspective,” one person familiar with the situation said. “We have bad days, but let’s move forward.”
Some allies and concerned lawmakers were buoyed by Biden’s forceful appearance in Raleigh, N.C., the day after the debate, and his well-received speech in front of a raucous crowd became the centerpiece of a new campaign ad.
Former senator Ted Kaufman (D-Del.), one of Biden’s lifelong friends, said the president has developed an “inner confidence” that comes from having defied his naysayers repeatedly over the years.
“Being through the tough things has created an environment where he is confident in his own ability to get up in the morning and deal with what’s on his plate, not what happened last night or yesterday or the day before,” Kaufman said in an interview.
But some critics of the keep-calm-and-carry-on approach worry that the inner confidence of Biden and his aides is out of step with the precarious position he and his party face after the debate. They have waited to see if Biden, 81, would address the concerns about his age more directly or change his approach to campaigning, but so far, they have been disappointed.
Some donors and vulnerable Democratic lawmakers have told associates they feel the campaign is gaslighting them by insisting Biden’s poor debate performance was a one-off rather than part of mounting evidence that his capabilities are declining, according to two congressional Democratic aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
While Biden acknowledged signs of age in the North Carolina rally — noting that his speech, gait and debating skills have worsened over the years — that argument is far from a winning message for Democrats, the aides said.
Campaign aides say presenting Biden as “America’s comeback kid,” — as New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) described him Saturday — can win over skeptical voters.
The campaign ad featuring Biden’s North Carolina speech debuted Monday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program, one of several cable shows that have featured debate over whether the president should withdraw from the race.
Viewers who turned in early to the show would have heard host Mika Brzezinski, who along with husband Joe Scarborough has a personal relationship with Biden, make a robust case for why he should continue his campaign.
“This moment in the race fits the entire narrative of Joe Biden’s life,” she said. “In his personal and professional life, Biden has repeatedly risen up from rock bottom.”
Over the next 10 minutes, she went on to lay out the president’s personal history of trials and triumphs, including a 1988 aneurysm that nearly took his life, the death of Beau, the felony conviction of his son Hunter, and a presidency that weathered setbacks and tumult to produce a lengthy legislative record.
Some of the most pivotal moments in Biden’s life have involved presidential campaigns — with agonizing decisions of whether to mount a run or bow out.
In 2020, he faced embarrassing defeats in the early nominating states, coming in fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire. While several strategists suggested the former vice president should gracefully end his presidential bid, Biden traveled to South Carolina, where a victory supercharged his campaign.
“For all those of you who’ve been knocked down, counted out, left behind, this is your campaign,” Biden said in his victory speech. “Just days ago, the press and the pundits declared this candidacy dead. Now, thanks to all of you, the heart of the Democratic Party, we just won. … And we are very much alive.”
He went on to win the Democratic nomination and defeat Trump that November, triumphs that bolstered his confidence in himself and further undermined his faith in polls and pundits.
Biden also faced a difficult decision about whether to run for president in 2016, after Hillary Clinton had already entered the race and garnered crucial endorsements from the party’s elite. In his 2017 book, “Promise Me, Dad,” Biden recounted how many top Democrats, including President Barack Obama, discouraged him from running by suggesting he couldn’t win. He ultimately decided not to jump into the race, citing his grief over Beau’s death as a factor.
Clinton was defeated by Trump in the 2016 general election, a development that deepened Biden’s skepticism toward those who discouraged him from running. Biden has since suggested that he could have prevented Trump from entering the White House in the first place. “I regret it every day,” he said later about the 2016 decision to stay out of the race.
Biden and his allies have since suggested that he remains uniquely positioned to defeat Trump in November, even after his debate stumbles.
“I think he’s the only Democrat who can beat Donald Trump,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”
Still, Biden’s robust confidence in his own political abilities may have been one reason he struggled so much at the debate, some historians have said, pointing to a long past of incumbents who falter during their first debates.
“Nobody rises to the Oval Office without Olympic-grade competition genes, so I’m sure that he believed he would prove the doubters wrong,” said Russell Riley, a presidential historian at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.
Biden, he said, probably expected he would easily defeat Trump at the debate. He added, “By all accounts, he did not.”
Tyler Pager, Dan Balz and Leigh Ann Caldwell contributed to this report.
