“I can do the job”: Joe Biden tried on Friday to silence the little music on a possible withdrawal of his presidential candidacy, after a calamitous debate against Donald Trump which deeply shook his supporters.
“I don’t speak as easily as I used to, I don’t speak as fluently as I used to, I don’t debate as well as I used to,” the 81-year-old Democrat acknowledged at a rally in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Video“A disaster”: after the first Biden-Trump debate, concern mounts among Democrats
“I give you my word as Biden. I would not run again if I did not believe, with all my heart and soul, that I can do this job,” added the American president, however, stating his “intention to win” this disputed state in the southeast.
“Bad debates happen”
No question of withdrawal of candidacy, therefore, for a president almost unrecognizable on Friday, after the 90 painful minutes he spent Thursday evening facing his 78-year-old Republican rival, between swallowed words, unfinished sentences and haggard expression.
The leader subsequently received the strong support of Barack Obama, who remains one of the most respected voices in the Democratic Party. “Bad debates happen,” brushed off the former president, assuring that this election “remained a choice” between someone “who fought all his life for ordinary people” and Donald Trump, “who does not only cares about himself. »
In Raleigh, Joe Biden, aided unlike the day before by a teleprompter, repeated all the attacks that had fallen flat during the debate, boasted about his record and his ideas. He even jogged a few times as he arrived on stage.
Donald Trump “is a crime wave all by himself,” he said of the first former American president to be criminally convicted and prosecuted in a series of cases.
Trump’s Lies
At his side, his wife Jill Biden, very involved in this re-election attempt, wore a dress with multiple inscriptions “Vote. »
The Biden camp therefore wants to believe that by November, the terrible impression left on Thursday evening could fade, while the “lies” spouted off by Donald Trump and concerns for American democracy would take over again.
It will be difficult. The Raleigh speech obviously has, in terms of audience, nothing comparable to the debate organized by CNN. According to the Nielsen institute, the latter attracted 48 million viewers.
“Joe Biden, a good man, a good president, is not in a position to run for re-election,” wrote a New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman, on Friday, even saying he “cried” at the performance of his “friend »Joe Biden.
Even Donald Trump’s supporters were careful not to add to it. “The guy almost made me feel sorry for him. Trump ate him alive,” commented Paul Meade, a 65-year-old retiree interviewed by AFP in Chesapeake, Virginia, where the 78-year-old billionaire is expected early this afternoon.
Wave of “panic”
The American media are reporting a wave of “panic” among Democrats, four months before the election and about six weeks before the convention that is supposed to swear in the president. For the moment, however, no heavyweight of the Democratic Party has publicly relayed this feeling.
Joe Biden is now going to New York, for a ceremony commemorating one of the very first LGBT mobilizations in the United States, in June 1969, and for a meeting with donors.
On Saturday, he will raise funds in the chic Hamptons resort area, also an opportunity to take the pulse of his financial backers in an extremely expensive election race.
Vice-President Kamala Harris herself recognized that Joe Biden had made a “laborious” start but felt that he had finished “strong” against an opponent who multiplied false assertions without ever losing his calm or his poise.
The 59-year-old Democrat will campaign in Nevada on Friday. Her name is obviously on the list of those who could replace Joe Biden in the event of his withdrawal before November, along with those of a few prominent Democratic governors, such as Gavin Newsom in California or Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan.
