CNN’s post-presidential debate panel pulled no punches with its analysis of President Joe Biden’s performance against Donald Trump in the first debate of the 2024 election.
“That was painful. I love Joe Biden. I worked for Joe Biden. He didn’t do well at all. He did not do well at all,” former Barack Obama adviser-turned-CNN political analyst Van Jones said after Thursday’s head-to-head, which the network hosted in Atlanta.
“I love that guy. That’s a good man. He loves his country. He’s doing the best that he can,” Jones said of Biden. “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.”
“We’re still far from our convention and there is time for this party to figure out a different way forward,” Jones added. “But 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 the pain of what we saw tonight.”
Most of the panel agreed that Trump hadn’t exactly come up smelling of roses following the debate, with his multiple falsehoods, failure to grasp policy talk, and mean comments about Biden.
But Biden was “dismal,” said CNN chief national correspondent John King.
The current panic among Democrats is unlike anything before, suggested anchor Abby Phillip.
There is a “sense of shock” and Democrats now need to seriously talk about possibly replacing Biden on the ticket, said former Obama campaign adviser-turned-CNN commentator David Axelrod.
Republican strategist David Urban, meanwhile, called Biden’s performance an “unmitigated disaster.”
Elsewhere on CNN, anchor Chris Wallace said Biden wasn’t “capable of doing any better than he did.”
And on MSNBC, former Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) told host Rachel Maddow that Biden had one job of reassuring Americans he was up to the job — and he failed.
“Trump is so terrible that this might heal itself,” said McCaskill. “But based on what I’m hearing from a lot of people […] there is more than hand-wringing tonight. I do feel like people are confronting a crisis.”
