Nothing to See Here? White House Portrays Biden's Debate Performance as a Blip – The New York Times
Advertisement
Supported by
White House Memo
Critics of the approach say it risks making President Biden and his campaign seem woefully out of touch with the voters they need to win.
Reporting from Washington
Seventy-two hours after the debate in Atlanta last week, President Biden and those closest to him have settled on the same strategy police officers use to shoo bystanders away from a car crash: “Nothing to see here.”
According to the talking points being repeated by the president’s aides and surrogates, the debate was a 90-minute blip in a long campaign. Mr. Biden didn’t have “a great night,” as he told donors Saturday, but fund-raising is going strong and he has already bounced back.
Aides have been pushing a similar message for more than a year, as polls have shown that voters are worried about the president’s age. They have brushed off such concerns, calling them little more than a creation of the media and the MAGA movement supporting the campaign of former President Donald J. Trump.
Jen O’Malley Dillon, the president’s top campaign strategist, said on Saturday that any drop in the polls would be the result of “overblown media narratives.” Senator John Fetterman, Democrat of Pennsylvania, dismissed anxiety about the president’s performance, saying on “Fox News Sunday” that “it’s like one debate.”
And yet, like the bystanders at the car crash, voters do not need to be told what happened during the face-off with Mr. Trump. They saw it with their own eyes.
“Telling people they didn’t see what they saw is not the way to respond to this,” Ben Rhodes, who was a top foreign policy adviser to President Barack Obama, wrote on social media an hour after the debate ended on Thursday.
We are having trouble retrieving the article content.
Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Advertisement