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Welcome to the online version ofFrom the Politics Desk, an evening newsletter that brings you the NBC News Politics team’s latest reporting and analysis from the campaign trail, the White House and Capitol Hill.
In today’s edition, senior political editor Mark Murray looks at how Democrats’ efforts to downplay concerns about Joe Biden’s age have come back to bite them. Plus, we break down all the fallout from Thursday’s debate and another day of major Supreme Court decisions.
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Biden’s allies spent a year dismissing concerns about his age. That was a mistake.
By Mark Murray
After Thursday’s debate, there’s a separate storyline to consider beyond President Joe Biden’s shaky performance and former President Donald Trump’s lies and misleading statements.
That storyline: the yearlong Democratic campaign to discredit concerns about Biden’s age, his fitness and his ability to defeat Trump in a non-Covid presidential campaign — especially with polls showing a super-majority of voters having worries about Biden’s age.
Biden’s allies and liberal commentators sneered at Rep. Dean Phillips’ plea last summer for someone, anyone, to challenge Biden in the primaries to prove he’s up to the task in a race against Trump. (That someone eventually turned out to be Phillips, a Minnesota Democrat, himself.)
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“He’s essentially torpedoing his career completely and destroying any goodwill he has within the Democratic Party,” one House Democrat told NBC News about Phillips’ challenge to Biden.
They attacked special counsel Robert Hur after his report this year referred to Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory.”
“Cheap shot” and “playing politics” was how Biden’s allies reacted to Hur.
They ridiculed news organizations (like The Wall Street Journal) and prominent commentators (like Ezra Klein and David Ignatius) who raised doubts about Biden’s fitness in recent months.
And they launched a campaign against “cheap fake” videos that portrayed Biden’s age, mannerisms, and gait in the public eye — sometimes misleadingly, sometimes not.
But after last night’s debate, who was more right than wrong — the ones raising the concerns about Biden, or those who were dismissing and discrediting them?
That question is important to ask, now that Democrats are in a full-blown panic about Biden as their presidential option after last night’s debate.
The White House, the Democratic Party, and their allies spent an entire year dismissing concerns about Biden’s age and fitness. And now there are less than two months until the party will officially select its presidential nominee.
Biden tries to bounce back: ‘I don’t debate as well as I used to’
Biden sought to turn his disappointing debate performance into a rallying cry for his supporters at a campaign event in Raleigh, N.C., on Friday, painting himself as down, but not out, as some in his party whisper about replacing him atop the ticket.
“I know I’m not a young man. I don’t walk as easy as I used to. I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to, but I know what I do know — I know how to tell the truth!” an energetic Biden said, nodding at the criticism he received following the debate while contrasting it with assessments about the accuracy of several of Trump’s statements.
“When you get knocked down, you get back up,” Biden yelled, to a cheering crowd.
How Democrats are reacting: Privately, many Democrats — including some lawmakers — said that they are worried about Biden’s election chances. But publicly, they’re putting on a brave face and downplaying the impact of a single debate.
On Capitol Hill, Democrats acknowledged Biden performed poorly Thursday night but didn’t agree with those who called on him to drop out of the presidential race.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said: “He got off to a bad start. I thought he came through OK on the issues later.”
How Trump is reacting: Trump mocked Biden during a rally in Virginia on Friday, saying the president “didn’t know what the hell he was doing.”