Fetterman defends Biden debate flub amid calls for president to drop out of the race

Joe Biden’s defenders rallied to his side on Sunday across the cable news circuit and rejected calls for the president to drop out of the 2024 race.

Chief among them was John Fetterman, whose own rocky debate performance in 2022 following a stroke was thought by some to have been a death knell of the now-senator’s campaign. Fetterman beat his opponent, Dr Mehmet Oz, despite enduring Republican attacks labelling him brain damaged and unable to carry out the basic functions of his office.

Biden’s debate performance on Thursday against Donald Trump has been seen as a disaster by the political world. Polls have shown that the segment of voters who believe the president does not have the required mental fitness for the job has grown substantially, with a CBS poll finding only 27% of those polled believe Biden has the mental and cognitive health required to serve as president.

The Pennsylvania senator appeared on Fox News Sunday, where host Shannon Bream asked him about calls from Democratic supporters as well as media outlets such as The New York Times and Atlanta Journal-Constitution arguing that the president should immediately step aside and allow Democrats to pick a successor.

“There’s no value in any of those things,” Fetterman told Bream, after mockingly clutching his cheeks and quipping, “oh no!”.

“There was the same kind of a freakout after my debate, and in fact I might even say that I had a more difficult evening than the president did. And here I am right now, having this conversation.”

He went on to argue that Biden remained the only Democratic candidate with a proven electoral history of victory against Donald Trump, an argument the Biden campaign itself tried to make to supporters on Saturday in a fundraising email. But even the polling shared by deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty in the email to the campaign’s allies depicted other Democrats including Vice President Kamala Harris and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg as within a statistically negligible distance from the president’s own projected level of support.

Fetterman was joined on the Sunday circuit by another swing-state senator, Raphael Warnock, in his rejection of the calls for the president to step aside. A CBS News poll taken over Friday and Saturday after the debate showed as many as seven in ten registered voters across the US believing that Biden “does not have the mental and cognitive health to serve as president”.

Warnock appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press. Moderator Kristin Welker asked him directly if the president should end his candidacy, to which the Georgia senator replied: “Absolutely not.”

Referencing his service as a pastor for Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, Warnock said, “I can tell you there’ve been more than a few Sundays when I wished I had preached a better sermon. But after the sermon was over it was my job to embody the message, to show up for the people I served, and that’s what Joe Biden’s been doing.”

“He’s been showing up for the American people. He’s been showing up for seniors as they’ve been dealing with the rising cost of prescription drugs, having to choose between buying food and buying medicine in the wealthiest nation on Earth. He’s been showing up for folks chasing the American dream [but] found themselves mired in student debt.”

It was a common argument heard from Biden’s loyal supporters in the days and hours after Thursday’s debate, when the president appeared to lose track of his point while speaking at several moments. Democrats have argued that the president’s policy record remains a major reason to support his re-election. In general, the party remains divided over how to respond to concerns about the president’s mental fitness following his first showdown with Trump, another being on the horizon.

But some have taken their defences of the president a step further. Ex-Speaker Nancy Pelosi was on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, where she attacked Trump over his own mental faculties.

“There are health care professionals who think that Trump has dementia,” she told Dana Bash. “If we're just talking about mental acuity, let's be fair about it.”

The president’s campaign has also pointed to a fundraising surge in their favor following Biden’s televised clash with Trump. By Sunday, the campaign said it had raised more than $33m.

It was also lashing out at NBC News over a report claiming that the president was huddling with family members at Camp David to discuss the future of his campaign, pointing out the planned travel had been announced well before the debate. Flaherty, in a tweet, called the story “media-fabricated bullsh**”.

“It’s a familiar story: Following Thursday night’s debate, the beltway class is counting Joe Biden out. The data in the battleground states, though, tells a different story,” campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dixon added in a memo to supporters this weekend.

“Our team knows a thing or two about putting our heads down and doing the work to win hard races,” she continued. “This will be a very close election. It was always going to be...That’s what our campaign has been planning for.”

Biden himself addressed the event at a campaign fundraiser on Saturday.

“I understand the concern about the debate. I get it. I didn’t have a great night,” said Biden at the event, attended by radio legend Howard Stern and others. “But here’s what I -- [what’s] not getting reported: Voters had a different reaction than the pundits. Since the debate, polls show a little movement, and we’ve moved us up, actually.”

“He -- and, by the way, the Times had their editorial,” the president continued. “Well, guess what? They also pointed out he lied 28 times in a matter of 90 minutes.”