Top liberal media voices turn on Biden

Prominent liberal columnists are calling for President Joe Biden to step aside following a widely-panned debate performance against former President Donald Trump.

Before the debate concluded, New York Times columnist Nick Kristof said he hoped Biden would step aside and allow another Democratic politician to be nominated and challenge Trump.

Others echoed Kristof’s message. Edward Luce, the Financial Times’ US national editor, pointed out that the two months between now and the August convention was plenty of time to nominate another candidate.

Jacob Weisberg, the former CEO of Slate, similarly called for Biden to allow someone else to take up the nomination.

MSNBC’s Joy Reid said that she had heard from people circulating the convention nomination rules:

The New Republic had a simple headline: Ditch Biden:

They join a small group of liberal commentators who have raised serious concerns about Biden’s candidacy in recent months. New York Times opinion columnist Ezra Klein dedicated a series of episodes on his popular Times podcast to why Biden should step aside, and how it would work. CNN’s David Axelrod has also drawn ire from Biden allies over his criticisms of the president’s campaign strategy, and doubts about his ability to win the race.

Over the past several years, the White House, Biden’s communications team and the Democratic party have done an effective job pushing back and tamping down on stories about Biden’s age. They complained that a Wall Street Journal story about the president’s age and what lawmakers think of him behind closed doors was a partisan hit-job and did not include enough quotes from Democratic politicians who believe that Biden has not lost a step. They chastised the White House press corps for having ”collective memory problems" themselves that prevented them from remembering Biden’s strong qualities and past “rightwing age attacks.” They’ve argued to reporters that Trump’s old age effectively negated the subject.

That battle will be much more difficult after Biden’s debate with Trump, and will ignite a fresh round of questions about whether Biden will or should be the nominee. The president’s primary surrogates took a relatively short stint in the spin room, before ceding much of the spin room to Trump’s surrogates. Biden’s poor performance also overshadowed one of the strongest complaints Democrats and left-leaning media pundits had: CNN’s failure to fact-check President Donald Trump’s numerous misstatements.

Before the debate began, Semafor asked California Gov. Gavin Newsom whether it would put to rest the question of whether the Democrats would replace the former president.

“One hundred percent,” said Newsom. “Enough. I mean, honestly — enough!”

In a brief interview after the debate, CNN CEO Mark Thompson said he felt that “the entire point of debate was to let the American voters, the American public and the world see the two candidates, setting out their visions for America, and also critiquing each other’s versions of America. And I thought that the program succeeded at doing that.”

The CNN chief said that the debate largely went according to how the network game-planned it, saying that in general most of the answers to the questions and the sort of political points and the repartee between two candidates was “very close to the way we prepared for it before and thought about it,” though there were a few surprises.

Asked about criticism that the moderators should’ve done fact-checking, Thompson chuckled and said it “should’ve been your first question” and walked away.

The Wall Street Journal faced the fury of the White House and criticism from other media after reporting that people who had met Biden privately said he was “slipping.”

I asked Editor-in-Chief Emma Tucker whether she felt vindicated by the debate.

“Very much so. The reporters took a lot of grief for covering a story that needed to be covered and that no other main stream publishers were willing to touch. I am very proud of them.”

America debated Joe Biden’s age for years before Thursday’s presidential debate, as a Semafor Signal details.