Biden: ‘I screwed up’ during debate, but ‘we’re gonna just beat Donald Trump’

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4755288-biden-acknowledges-poor-debate-performance-committed-reelection-trump/damp/?nxs-test=damp

31 comments

  1. My hope is him not mentioning himself by name means something.

  2. This was my attitude heading into finals after skipping an entire semester of assignments.

  3. I feel like we’re on the Titanic with Biden as the Captain. We haven’t hit the iceberg yet let us change course!(with a new candidate).

  4. He’s gaslighting us. It’s not just the 90 minute debate. He has been declining and we all see it. Don’t patronize us. The fact that you’re hiding, not doing events like press conferences where you can actually dispel the impression and prove us wrong, demonstrates we are right. The burden is on you now. Don’t tell us, show us.

  6. Look, I’m voting blue no matter who. Heck, I’ll vote for a slice of old pizza if it’s on the ticket, but I’m not who he needs to win over right now. Many of us on reddit who lean blue aren’t the people he needs to win over. I appreciate the recognition of the poor debate performance, but we need to hear **a PLAN**. Just saying, “we’re gonna win” isn’t going to cut it. Please, for the love of whatever, ARTICULATE A PLAN FORWARD.

  7. Kennedy/Nixon 1960

    Biden is toast. Hubris won’t allow him to step aside

  8. My father started sundowning in 2019. He’s gone now. No one in their right mind thinks Joe can hang until January 2029. It’s over. Please Joe, listen to reason.

  9. > when you get knocked down, just get back up.

    If he was gonna get up then he’d be doing town halls and calling for more debates. Rematches when he doesn’t have this “cold”. But he can’t, and probably shouldn’t get back up.

    There is a reason that the boxer isn’t the one who decides when to throw in the towel. A damaged brain doesn’t always know it’s been knocked out.

    Trump was fucking terrible at the debate. He lied constantly. He forgot about Afghanistan. He started with far right conspiracy theories and veered right off the tracks to incoherent schizophrenia. He literally said abortions were being done right after the child was born.

    Any of the other Democrats in the primary would’ve **destroyed** Trump. Hell, even the Republicans would’ve, there is a reason Trump refused to debate in the primaries.

    Ah well. Biden should’ve dropped out in 2022. Its probably too late now. Hecan stay down and the party will have to win without him.

  10. Cool, prove that it was an outlier by having a 2-hour town hall

  11. >“I had a bad night,” he told Wisconsin radio host Earl Ingram in a prerecorded interview. “I screwed up. I made a mistake. But I learned from my father, when you get knocked down, just get back up. And you know, we’re gonna win this election. We’re gonna just beat Donald Trump as much as we did in 2020.”

    OK, so if he had a bad night surely he can do at least a number of hostile (or at the very least neutral), unscripted 1 hour live interviews, right? Like a townhall thing?

  12. He didn’t screw up. “I screwed up” implies he just made some fixable mistakes. What we saw was the best he’s capable of doing at this stage.

  13. Biden: “we’re gonna just beat Donald Trump”.

    Yeah, just like an old grandpa tells a young asshole “come here son, I’ll teach you a lesson.”

  14. I don’t care about Biden, I really don’t. I’d actually care more about you if you got the fuck out of the way after your first term, as you would have shown yourself to be a man of principal and vision, and not just another predictable politician whose ego eclipses his brain. Fuck your legacy, fuck your family’s feelings, fuck your feelings you old shitbird. I and my children have to live in the nation your not long for this world’s ass is playing ego games with. He better hope to fucking god he wins, because it will 100% be his fault that people will get hurt and lives will be ruined for generations, because some old turd didn’t recognize it was well past time to be flushed.

  16. Chronically out of touch centrists neoliberal dems are handing the country over to Christian nationalists 

  17. I think it is the fault of high democratic party figures, but also all the high-ranked we don’t see that often in news. They have alot of old people like Pelosi and many of them have such crazy inflated ego they won’t move a finger to help the american people, just thinking about their own position and wasting their time in calculating how they can grab some ranks internally, or STAY. So at the end of the day they don’t worth much more than the clown-traitor from the other side. This is pretty sad seems US are fucked up by their own trillionnaires, billionaires, lobbies and greed culture.

  18. Then what? Resign immediately? He can’t do another four years.

  20. The bar needs to be a bit higher. The litmus test to me isn’t whether Biden can beat Trump but whether Biden will finish a second term. I personally have not been reassured yet but I’m being as patient as I can.

    And honestly, nobody knows today how the election will play out. I will say, Biden is lucky this debate didn’t happen in October.

  21. I know that this is anecdotal and holds no weight, however emotionally the fact that Biden said “I screwed up” makes me sad. My 73 year old father, who has Alzheimer’s, characterizes every calamity that he endures because of his condition as “I screwed up”. Ugh.

  22. It wasn’t just a bad night or one bad debate. You are too old for the job.  MOVE OVER. A man your age should be taking a nap in a chair someplace with a blanky laid over his legs.  

    Problem is all the people around him ‘advising’ him have their own personal interests wrapped up in him as well as a hefty dose of sunk costs. He’s gonna need to get out of that bubble to see that stepping down is the right call. 

  23. I mean, scotus just legalized by any means necessary. Get creative.

  24. It really wasn’t his speech that was the problem. It was his body language. I don’t think people have seen Biden outside of a few news segments. The empty stares downwards with mouth slightly ajar. The slow movements when looking around. Looked like a god damn turtle. I also think he may have been wearing an earpiece and that tripped him up even more. There were a couple of times he scratched his ear and stuck his finger in.

    In any case, I am still voting Blue no matter what!

  25. Yeah sure and my grandpa still thinks he can drive.

  26. I’ll still vote for Biden if he is the nominee. But Trump will win unless Biden is replaced. It really is that simple.

  27. It’s going to keep coming across as disingenuous as long as he keeps avoiding the visible fact of the matter. He did not have a “bad debate.” Rather, he appeared to be cognitively incapable of debate.

    That’s not a “screw up.” There’s no shame in getting older, even losing capacity. It will happen to us all. A “screw up” of biblical proportions would be to continue as a candidate if you are no longer able to function at the level of demand.

    And, rather than going forward to demonstrate that it was an “episode” and not a “condition,” he didn’t follow that up with public or media appearances featuring extemporaneous thought and speech. Rather, he sheltered for days, held private meetings with family, avoided key political allies and did nothing to suggest otherwise.

    There are only two explanations for that that I can think of. Pride, which is unforgivable in light of the stakes, and incapacity, which is forgivable though not acceptable in a candidate.

    Keeping in mind we lost fundamental rights (and potentially our entire democracy) due to RBGs hubris in resisting the signs of age, Biden’s protests are hollow at best and horrific at worst.

    We’re not “pushing you aside,” Joe. It’s not your personal right to run for President. The PEOPLE are rightly concerned and deserve clear evidence of your ability to express our will in an increasingly dark and dangerous age.

  28. It’s nice to see someone being able to admit when they screwed up….

    But dude should step down. It’s just not believable anymore.

  29. Did you watch the feb 8th press conference too? This isn’t a 1 off. Stop playing that it is, it’s making it worse. That “one bad day” is just the confirmation that SOTU wasn’t good enough which we all HOPED BEYOND HOPE that it would be.

    I think a Trump presidency is a worst case scenario. I was willing to hold my nose and vote for Biden but I’m over that too. I’m showing up but writing in a throw away. I don’t trust this man doing the job THIS YEAR, nevermind for 4 more years. Change him and I’m back on board. Policy doesn’t even matter to me at this point. But it’s just denial and gaslighting by this DNC who is racing as fast as it can to match the depravity of the RNC

    You deserve the civil war you set us up for. I’ll be in my basement trying not to die or getting scooped up by secret police or whatever the neo nazis have in mind.

    Democracy is dead.

  30. “I didn’t have a good debate. That’s 90 minutes on stage,” he said. “Look at what I’ve done in 3.5 years.”

    THIS IS NOT ABOUT YOUR RECORD. THIS IS ABOUT THE NEXT TERM

    I’ll still vote for him even if it’s a literal Weekend at Bernie’s situation, but the statements are just getting downright absurd at this point:

    “I screwed up. I made a mistake. But I learned from my father, when you get knocked down, just get back up.”

    I’m sorry but getting old isn’t a mistake and it’s not something you can ‘get back up’ from. Anyone around him encouraging this delusion is just delaying the inevitable – we need a different candidate and soon

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