The ABC News panel had some choice words for President Biden following his primetime interview with anchor George Stephanopoulos Friday.
“Look, Biden looked better and certainly more coherent than he looked during the debate, but there’s nothing in this interview that is calming nerves of jittery Democrats who fear that Joe Biden is on a trajectory to lose this race, to lose to Donald Trump,” ABC News chief Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl told Stephanopoulos after the interview.
“In fact, for some of those people, the interview is raising new concerns, particularly the fact that he is unwilling or unaware of the fact that he is in a dire situation here regarding the campaign, that he is losing, in the view of many Democrats and frankly in the polls you cited, that he is losing to Donald Trump,” he said.
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Karl added it was “alarming” when Biden said he would be content with a hypothetical defeat against former President Trump as long as he as he “gave it [his] all,” telling Stephanopoulos that a Biden ally reacted to him with a “wow.”
“The bottom line here: there was nothing in this interview that will force Joe Biden out of the race… but there’s also nothing in this interview that will calm the nerves of Democrats who are saying it’s time for him to get out,” Karl added.
ABC News chief global affairs correspondent Martha Raddatz said those Democrats she had texted insisted the interview “wasn’t as bad as they expected,” but added, “That’s a pretty low bar.”
The network’s congressional correspondent Rachel Scott told Stephanopoulos after hearing from Democratic lawmakers, they’re concerned that while the “dam hasn’t broken tonight,” “the bleeding has not stopped, either.”
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“Another Democrat telling me, ‘Better, but not sure that is enough,’ that they need more than one interview, more than 22 minutes to prove that the president has the stamina to continue in this race and defeat Donald Trump,” Scott said before adding that the “movement” trying to remove Biden as the Democratic nomine “is growing.”
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Raddatz concluded the panel by pointing to Biden’s default response, “Watch me,” when asked about his age, stressing that aging “is not like a broken bone. It doesn’t get better.”
“Everyone is watching and believe me they’re going to be watching even more closely as we go forward, George,” Raddatz told the anchor.
Among the most talked-about moments from Biden’s sit-down with Stephanopoulos, the first he has given since last month’s presidential debate, was his uncertainty of whether he had watched his disastrous debate performance and his refusal to commit to a cognitive test.
Biden’s shocking debate performance has become a political earthquake with wide swaths of the liberal media calling for him to withdraw from the presidential race.
At a Friday campaign rally in Wisconsin, Biden insisted he is “staying in the race.”
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