By Stephanie Kelly and Steve Holland
(Reuters) – Supporters of U.S. President Joe Biden hoped Thursday night’s debate would allay concerns that the 81-year-old was too old for another term, but his gravelly voice and sometimes hesitant demeanor against his Republican rival Donald Trump did it opposite.
Biden and Trump, 78, both faced concerns about their age and fitness in the run-up to the Nov. 5 election, but those concerns weighed more heavily on Biden.
On Thursday, Biden, his voice hoarse from a cold, rushed through some of his talking points on the debate stage, stumbling over some answers and disappearing during others.
About halfway through the debate, a Democratic strategist who worked on Biden’s 2020 campaign called it a “disaster.”
Trump came with a barrage of criticism, including persistent lies such as migrants causing a crime wave and that Democrats support infanticide. Early in the debate, Biden stopped talking about Medicare and tax reform and seemed to lose the thread.
Tax reform would provide money to help “strengthen our health care system, and ensure that we can make every single lonely person eligible for what I was able to do with the, with the COVID, excuse me, with dealing with everything that we had. have to do,” Biden said, pausing for a moment. “We finally beat Medicare.”
Trump took a swipe at Biden for being incoherent, saying at one point, “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said.”
“Biden is not speaking in a measured way and it seems like he is fumbling for words,” said Ray La Raja, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Before the debate, Biden limited himself to nearly a week of “debate camp” with top advisers at the presidential retreat at Camp David in the mountains of western Maryland, an indication of how important his campaign felt Thursday night. It didn’t affect his performance, critics said.
“Trump is Trump, every word out of his mouth is bullshit. But Biden sounds old. And lost. And that’s going to matter more than anything. So far, this has been an absolute nightmare for Biden,” Joe Walsh, a former 2020 Republican presidential candidate who has been critical of Trump, said on X.
(Reporting by Stephanie Kelly. Additional reporting by Jarrett Renshaw and Jeff Mason. Editing by Heather Timmons and Deepa Babington)
