Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News. Welcome to voter Nomics, where politics and markets collide, and we're doing an emergency episode today, not just talking about all the elections around the world, but talking specifically about the debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden more or less universally agreed to have been a bad night, shall we say, for Joe Biden, and we're going to be talking about this with two
people well positioned to have not just instant instant considered reaction, if that isn't a contradiction in terms with us. In the London studio, Tim O'Brien, senior executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion and author of Trump Nation, The Art of Being the Donald, and joining us from Atlanta, where the debate was running on Sure Knowsley and Coffee, and he says some fumes Bloomberg reporter and the host of Bloomberg's Big Take podcast, David go. David, thank you in particularly because
I know that you've had a long night. You were doing lots on Bloomberg Television for us, and you've already put out an episode of the Big Take podcast on this, I guess for many Democrats rather unhappy toppic.
Great to be here.
So I know CNN, who were hosting the debate and broadcasting it, had a lot of constraints. So not only was it sort of unusual in having no audience, but I believe basically there were other reporters were not allowed in the room. So what was your experience in Atlanta?
Yes, the debate took place in a CNN studio in downtown Atlanta, and we the reporters, were in the basketball arena at Georgia Tech, so not too far geographically from the site of the debate, but we weren't in the room itself, and so we sat around the concourse in this arena during the debate itself and watched it on a JumboTron in the middle, and there were TV screens all around the concourse as well, and on the floor where the basketball court usually is, there was a red
carpet and leading up to the debate and afterward that was transformed into this spin room, spin floor, and surrogates for each of the candidates came out and greeted reporters and fielded their questions. So I watched the debate unfold that way, and I think what stands out to me is how once the debate ended, there was an intense
quiet in the arena. We made our way down to the floor, and then all of a sudden, there was kind of a crush of Republican surrogate circuits for Donald Trump, who came onto the floor to field questions, holding up signs, and reporters flocked to them. But we had to wait a good ten or fifteen minutes before any Democrats came out, and finally we saw Governor Gavin Neussom of California Senator Raphael Warnick of Georgia. They stood together, reporters gathered around them.
But it's clear that in those ten or fifteen minutes, in that vacuum, there must have been a lot of soul searching and a lot of effort that went into how to spin this in any positive light.
The mind boggles. I mean, when you sign up to via surrogate Nina that it could go badly, but then you sort of feel like you almost become like an undertaker in the trying to talk about how Biden performed. I think we know many people listening to this will have either watched it in the US or around the world or certainly seen some of the most damning clips. We're seeing a lot of commentators talking about this is the moment, the beginning of the end of the Biden presidency.
I saw one person many people calling for him to stand down. How serious do you sense that is in among senior Democrats and in the White House? Or is that also a sort of moment of silence where people are still just trying to compute that it happened.
There were a lot of whispers about the president's capacity to serve a second term. I think that this has amplified those whispers, and you talk about senior Democrats. As I watched the response to this on television and saw surrogates and others in that arena last night, I noticed that a lot of graybeards in the party is now types who have been big backers of the Bidens felt. I don't know if emboldened is the right word, but able to talk about the president's age and capacity in
a way that they hadn't before. So I think that we're at a moment where the next forty eight or seventy two hours are going to be key in terms of how large that conversation gets, how all encompassing it gets and plenty of people have drawn the analogy to nineteen sixty eight when LBJA addressed the nation and said that he wasn't going to seek a second term. I'll point out that happened in March of that exactly, the
primaries were still very much underway. And I think the trickiness of this moment is Joe Biden has been the presumptive nominee now for such a long time. Yes, there have been some Democrats who have made these outsider runs to succeed him, but that hasn't happened, and so I think that the actual procedure by which that would happen is so unclear. It certainly colors and shapes the conversation that we're going to have here in the next few days.
Tim O'Brien, Stephanie, are you in your sort of bones, do you think that this will be the beginning of a process that sees Biden no longer the candidate or do we have to fall back to all the same reasons why we didn't think that was likely a few months ago, or even nine months ago.
Well, I think it raises the stakes. Clearly. He's badly damaged by this debate. It's a monumental set back. He had one job in that debate, which was to convince voters he could stand shoulder to shoulder with Donald Trump and displays much energy in an acute mind, and an ability to defend some of the core policy issues that
the Democrats are steaking this campaign around. And he failed and failed and failed, and he failed spectacularly to the extent that I think actually probably his own team wasn't fully prepared for how bad this would be. The you know, the reality of removing him or coaching him to remove himself or Biden himself willingly letting go is somewhat complex.
He controls the delegates that have been pledged to him. Historically, in the United States, conventions were venues in which there were real hashing out of who the nominee would be, and that stopped around nineteen sixty I think JFK was the last presidential candidate who was in a convention where there was actual brokeraing going on on the floor. So that's sixty four years ago, and I think we're there's a possibility that this August we actually might have a
broker convention. And because certainly anybody in the party I think with a sense of strategic wiliness and tactical import is back on their heels. At a minimum, they're gonna I think they're gonna be. There's gonna be a lot of polling to see how badly Biden's hemorrhaging support. And so then if the if the idea becomes he doesn't to rescue this bid for the Democrats and to staunch some of the I think unusual threats Donald Trump presents.
How do you deal with that? There's first a small handful of people who would talk to Joe Biden, and the most important is his wife Jill and his sister Valerie, who are easily his two closest advisors. And then there's a handful of White House professionals, might Donald in chief of chief among them Ron Plain and Anita Dunn, and they all would gradually have to say it might be in the best interests of the party in this election
for you to willingly release your delegates. If he says no, then it gets into kind of raw and interesting mud wrestling. And I don't think anyone has an idea of what that would look like. So there's that if he does release his delegates, and he does decide to step aside, there is not a clear person to who's waiting in the wings to take on me. Obviously, Kamala Harris's vice
president is an obvious go to. There's not unified support for her for a number of reasons on policy issues, she hasn't been as firm on her feet at certain moments as people would want. I also think the fact that she's a woman and a loan of color has weighed against her, so that she if she wants this, she has to play for it. There's Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, at Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan.
They're all going to be in the wings. So there's both what will buy do and then what happens if he does it, and all of that's up in the air.
I mean, he's certainly been quite stubborn to date, and if he was in denial about his mental state, then probably the only one who wasn't surprised by his performance last night may have been Joe Biden. But I remember Israel Kline, the The York Times columnist and obviously podcast host.
He had pitched this whole thing, and I think he got a lot of blowback from others in the Democratic Party a few months ago where he talked about actually this kind of scenario that you would go a few months things would not be getting better in the polls. He obviously didn't foresee a debate that was as catastrophic
as last night. And the point he made was there had been a fear around an open convention and a sort of quote unquote brawl if it happens in a convention setting, but actually for a set of voters who were quote unquotes double haters and are fed up with both candidates very unenthusiastic. The people voting for Trump, many
of them not enthusiastically doing so, unlike twenty sixteen. In that context, actually a lively fight for the candidate candidacy at an in Chicago where you have a number of credible candidates could actually be a way to energize support for Democrats. David, do you think there's anything in that, because we now seem to be a little bit closer to that scenario than we were.
I mean, something that stood out to me as I watched his surrogates yesterday is how young they all are compared to him, And so I mentioned Gavin Newsom coming out at the end of the debate after the debate concluded. He was on the floor before it, and he's a quarter of a century younger than Joe Biden.
And.
Everybody's younger there.
Yeah, yeah, we joked, you know who is enjoying this more than Gavin Newsom himself just being out on the floor and greeting reporters and batting down these questions of is he the backup candidate if something were to happen for Joe Biden, who pushed that out of the way quite quickly.
And David a quarter century younger still makes him fifty six, because that's.
How exactly exactly I think that we could have that. I think what's interesting too about as Reclined is that he wrote that got that blowback, and then he was one among many converts who saw the State of the Union address and thought that Joe Biden had pulled it off. And I think that fueled a lot of optimism about how this debate was going to go among those who had been skeptical about the Presidence performance in this debate.
Going back to something that Tim said that I want to hit on is I think once I watched the debate start, I began to think that there was a bit of perhaps political malpractice. I mean, this is a debate that the Biden campaign wanted to have earlier than usual. Customarily, these debates don't happen until the parties have picked their nominees, and that didn't happen here. And I think Tim's hitting on something. Joe Biden, of course, has been a politician for a very long time and has a very close
circle of allies and advisors. The shorthand forward is Biden World, and I think that there has to be some element of soul searching that's going to happen now about why didn't anyone speak up? Why didn't anyone sound the alarm about this? I mean, the drum of commentary heading into this debate from those people in particular and their friends on cable TV here in the United States has been there's no way that he's going to batch this. The bar is low. He's definitely going to clear this bar.
And if this was a real concern that he perhaps has good days and bad days, and there wasn't a guarantee that this was going to be a success like the State of the Union. They put him in a very tricky position. I mean, he may very well have wanted to be in that position, but one would think that there would have been more protection and they would have done more to prevent what happened yesterday from taking place.
Yeah, and I think that's interesting because you do feel, among many other lots of sort of soul searching, it does go back to the judgment question, the judgment of his team not only putting him up for this, but as you intimate, setting the terms of the debate, which in a way that even at the time seemed to oddly favor Donald Trump. You know, he was unpopular in the past debates for having spoken over Joe Biden and
for seeming sort of seeming like a bully. But if you silence the microphones, if you don't have any fact checking in real time from the hosts, that all these people all these months who've said, no, really, he's fine. I mean, David, do you think that's also going to bounce back on senior Democrats who have insisted that he's absolutely on top of everything, because it was very hard for many people to believe that watching him.
Yeah, I was struck, especially by Claire mccaskell, the former senator, who spoke immediately after this and just acknowledged the fact that he had this job to do and couldn't do it. As Tim laid out at the top, it just it didn't work. And the objective was fairly simple here. You know, you look at how these two candidates prepared for this debate, and Joe Biden did it in a very traditional way.
He absconded to Camp David outside of Washington, d C. Hold up with his advisors, did, as we understand it, a few rounds of mock debates to get ready for this.
It was astonishing that that yielded nothing in terms of canned lines that he might use to rankle Donald Trump, or to emphasize how his policies are different, or to underscore when Donald Trump was lying or bending the truth, or has happened sort of completely off ffiscating what happened with January the sixth, then with the COVID nineteen pandemic. There were such extremes here and we knew going into
this debate. We talk about the rules. I mean, I think that Dana Bash and Jake Tapper, the two CNN anchors who moderated had said their job here wasn't to fact check it in real time, but absent that, it rested upon Joe Biden to do that. And I think that may be in one of the greatest failings of this that Donald Trump spewed a lot of lies which were used to at this point, but Joe Biden did nothing in the face of that to acknowledge or emphasize the fact that these were all in truth.
Yeah, I guess that was one other conclusion you could draw that actually, lots of other people could have beaten Donald Trump, that he would not have been hard to beat in that debate, just he was extremely hard to beat by Jay Biden, Right.
I don't think he was perceived as a convicted felon and someone who had been found guilty of sexual assault and twice impeached and foamed in an insurrection. He came off as an energetic frat boy ready to get into a bar fight, and at the moments on the I think on the debate screen where he was perplexed by
Biden's ineptitude, he looked like an avatar. Are for everyone watching the show who was also confused by Biden's inability to land a blow, you know, and David raised his good point about you know, the prep lines and and and the policy lines that that didn't come up. I almost think it's even it's it's it is definitely that,
as David pointing out. And it's even worse because I think a couple of moments he tried to yes and and either his response has meandered into sort of, oh grandpa was walking around in the woods late at night in his pajamas or uh. He mangled the point of the line and it was painful to watch. And sometimes when Trump was giving an answer, they'd have it, you know, side by side on the TV screen, and and.
And the other point you think, how would you have allowed the side by sides?
Yeah, and you know Biden's slack jaw or or he's looking off vacant and and and you sort of want to put a warm blanket around his shoulders and lead
him off stage. And that's you know that TV is a visual medium medium and in a debate, you know, famous see Richard Nixon was sweating because he had a fever and he hadn't really shaved, and people who listened to the Kennedy Nixon debate on the radio thought Nixon and one people watched on TV were like, this guy looks like he's an unhealthy thug, and why would we vote for him?
And it's a delicious thing just to interject, because Mark Thompson, the head of CNN ahead of this, said he wanted this debate to hearken back to that tim He wanted to have this kind of spare, slim down version of the debate, and so to have that element of a Canady yes was ailing. I mean, that's what we heard sort of minutes into this debate that Joe Biden had a cold and that was what was causing all of this. It's I mean, it's a delicious parallel that you're bringing up there.
And you know, one of the clips I think that went viral, or one of the moments that went viral, was when he tried to explain how the administration and Democrats had bulked up Medicaid and had delivered better health care to Americans and there was a long pause where he didn't talk, and he ended up, you know, as was well known now, saying, you know, we killed Medicaid.
It happened on immigration, it happened on abortion. It happened on the I mean, inflation, all the touch points, and it was just very painful to watch because Joe Biden in twenty twenty beat Donald Trump twice in debates and
owned him. And so this obviously is a much more I think adult and challenged person this time around, who has been a great public servant, but maybe a year ago should have said the best thing i can do right now, I've gotten us through this first term and into a new place, So I'm going to step aside for a new generation of Democrats. And he could have owned the narrative at that point, and now the narrative owns him.
I'm going to let you go in one second, but David, to go back to where we started, insofar as it's possible to say, what is your sense in terms of the critical mass of senior Democrats and the likelihood of them approaching Joe Biden or is this all going to be in the hands of whether he accepts some kind of reality or decides to stand down over the next few days.
I'm very curious what the conversations are going to be like among those senior Democrats and the degree to which his campaign and Biden world, as I mentioned, pushed back on all of this. Kate Bettingfield, his longtime aid and former communications advisor, was on CNN last night and I was struck by how frank she was in her assessment of this debate as well. And think she's quite at the point where she's saying that he shouldn't run her, he should step aside.
But I'll be.
Looking for any indications that there are movements in that for a moment, that the ground on which she is standing is changing. And I again, I'll go back to what I said. I think that the whispers have changed to a wider, broader conversation about his fitness and capacity for the job. And I just want to see sort of how much traction that gets among senior Democrats, as you say, just among policymakers more broadly.
And they're supposed to be out on the stump today campaigning, and I guess potentially through the weekend. I mean, is there any sense, I mean, even just looking at it last night, you didn't feel that Biden was necessarily up to that.
Yeah, So he went to this waffle house restaurant for an early breakfast before he caught a flight to Raleigh, and he actually actually seemed markedly better and more animated
at that at that restaurant. But yeah, he goes to Raleigh, North Carolina, which is this battleground state where I'm from, and he's supposed to campaign there today, and then this weekend he has a series of kind of high dollar fundraising events, one in the Hamptons and I think a couple in New Jersey as well, So it's quite possible that at those events he may address this or be
asked about this. Customarily, we don't get transcripts of the back and forth between donors and the president, but we do get a transcript of what he says at the top, and we'll read that.
And it feels like ethically bad judgment to send someone who's flubbed a debate to a waffle house the next day. It's like having Rishi Sunak in front of Number ten in the middle of the rain all visiting Titanic, Like, how hard are some of these atmospherics to master?
Well, this goes back to the malepractice and tim do you think, what's the chance that they're going to be telling those but donnors are going to be telling in the truth, because there don't seem to have been a lot of people telling in the truth. If last night it is more than just a bad night, if it really does speak to his demeanor day to day.
I mean, I do think he even surprised his own handlers, and I think people who had the state of the union in mind, and even some of his some of his other campaign stops where he looked stiff but was verbally acute. And I could be wrong, but I don't think anybody would have put him on the stage anticipating you know, that you'd end up like with quasi motor there. And so I think there's gonna be p The donors
have every reason to be frank. But again it's gonna like the person who's going to be very important right now is jiel Biden? His why?
And whoever lets him read the newspapers yes or doesn't?
Or watch TV?
David god, Tim Obrian, thank you, samank you, Stephanie, thank you, thanks for listening to this special Crash episode of Photo Nomics from Bloomberg. It was hosted by me Stephanie Flanders and produced by Sammersadi with help from Chris Martleu. Additional editing and sound designed by Blake Maples. Brendan Francis Nuna is our executive producer, and Sage Bowman is head of Bloomberg Podcasts. With special thanks to Tim O'Brien and David Gore.
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