Cleaver staunchly defends Biden against calls to step aside after debate performance
The moment President Joe Biden offered a raspy answer to the first question of Thursday night’s presidential debate, Democrats across the country went into a panic.
By the time the 90 minutes were up, Democrats were openly criticizing Biden’s lackluster debate performance, where he stumbled over answers and sometimes lost his train of thought, as former President Donald Trump frequently made false and misleading attacks.
Some even began suggesting that Biden step aside — appearing to prefer a complicated nomination process at a Democratic convention over keeping Biden at the top of the ticket.
Rep. Emanuel Cleaver thinks it’s an overreaction.
“I’m gonna buy some Democratic diapers for my colleagues, and then I think we go back to the locker room and prepare for the next outing and the next debate,” the Kansas City Democrat said.
As some Democratic members of Congress criticized Biden’s debate performance or tip-toed around it, Cleaver on Friday came out in staunch support of the president. While he acknowledged Biden struggled in the debate, Cleaver said too many of his Democratic colleagues were “setting their hair on fire” and that he’ll proudly cast his vote for Biden at the Democratic National Convention in August.
“The die is not cast based on a poor debate performance,” Cleaver said. “I think in terms of policy, whether he was articulated as clearly as I’d like, the truth of the matter is he still can very easily run the White House for another four years.”
Cleaver wasn’t alone in defending the president. Rep. Sharice Davids, an Overland Park Democrat, tried to shift the focus on Biden’s age to Trump’s stances on policy issues like abortion. During a question about Roe v. Wade, the former president falsely claimed that “everyone” wanted the Supreme Court to overturn federal protections for abortion and send it back to the states.
“While Rep. Davids is focused on helping Kansas families, what we saw last night is that Donald Trump is still focused on spreading lies and extreme measures to rip away reproductive health care for millions of Americans,” said Zac Donley, the spokesman for Davids.
But Cleaver and Davids appeared to be outliers. Immediately after the debate, Democrats and pundits said Biden’s performance did little to snuff one of the biggest questions of his presidency — whether or not the 81-year-old is too old to run for a second term.
When Biden was asked the question in the debate, he pointed out that Trump, who is 78, is only three years younger than him. But by the end of the question, the two candidates were arguing about their golf handicaps.
Former Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat, said on MSNBC after the debate that she was “heartbroken by Biden’s debate performance and acknowledged that there was a conversation about whether Biden should step aside.
“My job now is to be really honest,” McCaskill said. “Joe Biden had one thing he had to do tonight and he didn’t do it. He had one thing he had to accomplish, and that was reassure America that he was up to the job at his age, and he failed at that tonight.”
Republicans from Missouri and Kansas appeared gleeful about Biden’s performance. Missouri Sens. Eric Schmitt, who helped Trump prepare for the debate, and Josh Hawley took a victory lap on social media.
“Total triumph for Trump,” Hawley wrote. “Tomorrow the clamor to replace Biden will be deafening.”
But any effort to replace Biden would likely require him to willingly step down — a vast majority of the delegates attending the Democratic National Convention, like Cleaver, are bound to voting for Biden.
It didn’t appear the president had any plans of stepping aside on Friday. At a rally in North Carolina, Biden said he doesn’t walk, speak or debate as well as he used to. But he said “when you get knocked down, you get back up.”
“I would not be running again if I did not believe with all my heart and soul I can do this job,” Biden said.
