WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden’s reset after his disastrous debate performance is looking more like a return to business as usual.
Even if his Campaign seeks to ease Democrats’ anxiety and to reassure frightened donors, Biden emphasized presumption Republican Candidate Donald Trump, a Threat to the Nationand I’m trying to resume my role as president.
The president’s schedule for the week includes a briefing on extreme weather, a campaign reception, a Medal of Honor ceremony and the traditional White House Fourth of July barbecue. He will then depart for a weekend at his home in Wilmington, Delaware.
Nothing out of the ordinary, it all seemed clear.
But Vice President Kamala Harris, at a fundraiser Sunday night, gave a nod to what she called “the elephant in the room.” The debate, she admitted, was not Biden’s “finest moment.”
Yet, “putting aside questions of style, there was a clear contrast,” she argued, going on to call Trump “a threat to our democracy” and a “liar.”
Despite all the public efforts to refocus attention on Trump, there have been private discussions about what more Biden could do to counter what Americans saw during the debate, when he gave convoluted answers, occasionally wandered off, occasionally stared into space and sounded hoarse.
There has been debate over whether he should be seen more in public, at town hall events or at interviews and press conferences, which he has generally avoided during his time in office.
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But most of his close associates are waiting for more in-depth polling results to assess the extent of the damage before making any substantial change in course, said four Biden advisers who were not authorized to discuss internal discussions publicly and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
Biden’s team may not change anything at all. Many believe — or hope — that this difficult moment will pass, especially after Biden’s family encouraged him to stay in the race and continue fighting at a rally at Camp David on Sunday.
Campaign officials said Monday they had no new developments to announce. They said Biden would campaign as he has so far, tackling key battleground states as he has for months.
An ad released Monday was titled “I Know” and used clips from Biden’s post-debate rally in North Carolina, where he said, “When you get knocked down, you get back up.”
Quentin Fulks, Biden’s top deputy campaign manager, focused on Trump on a call with reporters, saying: “When you see President Biden on the ground, he will talk about why Americans should be afraid of Donald Trump, as he has for months.”
Even before the debate, the 81-year-old Democratic president’s age was a cause for concern. responsibility to votersAnd the prime-time face-off put the issue front and center in front of what may be the largest audience he will have in the four months leading up to Election Day. CNN, which hosted the debate, said more than 51 million people watched it.
“I think his age has a lot to do with his popularity, and I know he can do better than he did Thursday night. I expected to see better. I’m not sure other voters believed that,” said Jennifer Palmieri, White House communications director during the Obama administration and a spokeswoman for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.
She added that tactically, the campaign responded by promoting Biden’s vigorous speech in North Carolina on Friday and continuing to post strong fundraising numbers. Palmieri also said Biden may also want to do more interviews to continue to show that the debate was an anomaly.
“Their goal has to be to get him in front of the voters who matter most, and there has to be more interviews. Don’t be like Trump in your own little universe,” she said. “Right now, we’re still early, but what they’re doing is working.”
There is a sense that voters may now be watching Biden more closely, looking for signs that somehow indicate whether his debate debacle was just a blip — whether he is, as he says, capable of doing the job.
Alan Kessler, a lawyer and member of the Biden campaign’s national finance team, has spent days calming nervous donors, telling them what he says he’s personally seen when he sees the president: that he’s “lucid, strong as he’s always been.”
“To the extent necessary, I reassure people,” Kessler said.
Rebecca Katz, a strategist who worked with Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. John Fetterman’s winning 2022 campaign, saw potential parallels in Fetterman’s comeback from a shaky debate performance after suffering a stroke.
Fetterman’s team played up his opponent’s particularly fiery comments on abortion during that debate, and also flew the candidate around afterward. He gave numerous local television interviews to make sure voters in key markets saw him outside of the debate clips.
“It’s not a perfect comparison, but there is a model for the Biden campaign,” Katz said. “You can have a tough debate night and still win.”
Biden has expressed interest in doing at least one interview. At a fundraiser Saturday in East Hampton, New York, Biden said he spoke with host Howard Stern, who interviewed him in April, where he answered open-ended questions mostly about his early years.
The president told the crowd he was open to talking to Stern again: “I had a great time on his show. And I’m definitely going to take a chance on him again.”
The Democratic National Committee and Biden’s campaignMeanwhile, they continued to limit the damage by holding an evening conference call on finances. Over the weekend, they held calls with donors and one with dozens of committee members from across the country — some of the party’s most influential members. They offered an optimistic assessment of the path forward and gave no chance for other participants on the call to ask questions.
Several committee members present on the weekend teleconference, most of whom spoke on condition of anonymity about the private discussion, described feeling like they were being asked to ignore a serious situation.
Campaign officials said there had been “no discussion whatsoever” about Biden withdrawing from the race or any staff shakeups after the debate.
Democratic Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania said he thinks voters are more concerned about the issues anyway. “I’ve been working on this for a while and I know his work,” Casey said.
The window of opportunity for that is narrowing anyway. The Democratic National Committee has announced that it will use a virtual roll call to formally nominate the nominee before the convention begins in Chicago on August 19. But it’s not yet clear when that will happen or what it will look like.
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Associated Press writers Josh Boak, Michael Rubinkam in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Thomas Beaumont in Des Moinse, Iowa contributed to this report.
