“It was not a good performance,” Symone Sanders-Townsend, a former Biden White House senior adviser turned MSNBC host and pundit, said Tuesday morning. She added that “the chatter will not end” about Biden’s age.
“No one who watched with their eyes thought that was a good performance,” said Jen Psaki, Biden’s former press secretary, who also hosts a show on the network.
The new dynamic started immediately after Thursday’s debate, when a panel of MSNBC luminaries took an even harder edge.
Biden’s “job was to calm his party,” said MSNBC host Joy Reid. “To make them feel that: ‘Yes, I can do this. I have four more years in me. I have the ability and the stamina and the strength to do four more years.’ He did not do that. He did the opposite of that.”
Host Alex Wagner said that Biden’s answers were “rambling and incoherent,” adding that the president “did nothing to disabuse the country of the notion that he is very old and was lost frequently in that debate.”
The network’s biggest star, Rachel Maddow, seemed to grow frustrated when California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) said in an interview that Democrats should “worry less and do more.”
“What do you think that people who support President Biden, people in Democratic politics, people who are planning on voting for him, who are worried that he seemed older than they expected tonight, that he didn’t seem to reassure people on stamina issues, as Joy was saying before — what should people do?”
Media observers took note of MSNBC’s tone, considering the network’s longtime role as a balm for the anxiety of its left-leaning viewers.
“It was remarkable what those guys said,” said one veteran cable news anchor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly.
“We knew what Fox was going to say, and I had a pretty good idea of what CNN was going to say, but the question was what was MSNBC going to say, because that’s really where a lot of the messaging and alignment with the Democratic Party comes from,” said Democratic strategist Michael Starr Hopkins. “And for MSNBC hosts to come out and say, ‘Wow, this guy can’t do it,’ that was really telling.”
Perhaps the most significant shift occurred on the network’s morning show “Morning Joe,” which has reliably trumpeted Biden and hosted relatively sympathetic interviews with the president and Vice President Harris.
Biden is known to be a power-watcher of the morning show and reportedly speaks regularly with co-host Joe Scarborough. That’s what made it so surprising when the host began his Friday morning broadcast by saying that Biden “tragically did not rise to the occasion last night.”
Scarborough said he loves the president and believes he has had a productive administration. But, he added, “Donald Trump lied over and over and over and over again, and Joe Biden couldn’t respond to any of those lies.”
Most strikingly, Scarborough predicted that Trump would win reelection in November “unless things change.”
On Monday morning, Scarborough’s co-host Mika Brzezinski took a different tack, suggesting that calls for Biden’s departure from the race were premature.
“I don’t think it’s over,” she said. “ … My family and I, as you know, have known this man for decades, and his family, as well. And yes, I know them personally. And I still believe in Joe Biden.”
Nonetheless, it was “an unmitigated disaster by any measure,” she said. “More than three days after that debate, it is still hard to comprehend what we saw from the president. The weak, raspy voice. The inability to complete basic thoughts. Most importantly, the failure to call out Donald Trump on his endless lies.”
Mark Feldstein, a professor of broadcast journalism at the University of Maryland, said the impression viewers got from the debate was so glaring that it would have been hard for even Biden’s biggest media allies to spin.
“Trying to pretend this wasn’t the indisputable catastrophe that it was would destroy any pretense of credibility that MSNBC has,” he said.
After the debate, however, the criticism was not unanimous. MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell on Thursday night decried the importance of “optics” in presidential campaigns. “What’s happened here is imagery has taken control of the way we see presidential campaigns,” he said.
While Psaki acknowledged flaws in Biden’s performance, she said that trying to replace him on the ticket with a new candidate would be “very messy and potentially very divisive.” (During a guest appearance on an ABC program, she likened it to a plot twist of “The West Wing.”)
MSNBC host Chris Hayes praised Biden’s presidency in his post-debate commentary but drew a line between his accomplishments and his desirability as a candidate.
“The job of the president is making decisions,” he said. “The job of a presidential candidate is to communicate. … I think Joe Biden has a very good record on making decisions, and I think he’s a very poor communicator right now.”
