Jon Favreau, the Pod Save American host and former speechwriter to President Obama, called Thursday night’s presidential debate “f— awful,” saying President Biden failed “every single way” with his performance.
“I think it was a f— disaster,” he said on his podcast Pod Save America. “I think it was the worst debate I’ve ever seen in my entire life.”
Favreau hosts Pod Save America alongside other former Obama aides Tommy Vietor, Jon Lovett and Dan Pfeiffer. All four said they thought Biden lost the debate and that unless he is able to improve his performance in the coming months dramatically, he will lose the presidential election to former President Trump.
“Debates are a performance and what you say and how you say it both matter,” Vietor said. “So the optics, to start there, were very bad tonight. Biden had to answer concerns about his age. I think he exacerbated them. His voice sounded frail.”
Pfeiffer said Biden, already trailing Trump in polls, needed to bolster himself in the debate and instead did the opposite.
“The bigger thing here is that Biden is behind in this race,” Pfeiffer said. “You either change the dynamic in a race by taking advantage of huge, high leverage moments with lots of eyeballs on you in delivering in a big way.”
“Biden did not do that, and there may not be another moment like that, because a convention speech is not a moment like that,” he added.
Biden’s performance at the debate has led to a panic among Democrats.
A snap CNN poll showed that 67 percent of watchers believed Trump had won the debate, while only 33 percent believed Biden had won.
Since the debate, surrogates for the Biden campaign and the campaign itself have said that Biden will not step down and that Democrats should stop “hand-wringing” in public.
The Pod Save America hosts also slammed members of the Biden campaign who have called out Democrats discussing an open convention that could lead to a different nominee.
“It would be silly not to have this conversation,” Lovett said. “That’s not to say that a contested convention would be easy to necessarily nominate someone who can beat Donald Trump…Joe Biden’s gonna make the decision. The people around him are going to counsel him on this decision. But, like, I think that everyone else who saw what we all saw last night needs to be honest.”
“I think it’s totally legitimate for folks to say, you know what, actually I think sticking with Joe Biden is the best chance we have at winning,” Vietor said. “What is not acceptable is telling people to stop bedwetting, or that they didn’t see what they saw.”
Favreau also said that Biden’s performance at the debate was his fault and that his staff was “doing everything right.”
“The person who is to blame right now is Joe Biden because he has told all of us ‘I am the guy,’ Favreau said. “And then he did this.”
During the podcast, Favreau also said that Biden appeared to not be doing well at an LA fundraiser on June 15. Biden appeared sick and tired, having traveled straight from the G7 in Italy to the fundraiser in LA.
“We chalked it up as like, yeah, that was a pretty bad performance. He is pretty tired. They should let the guy sleep. Hopefully they’ll have him sleep and, and, and prep for this debate,” Favreau said. “By the way, everyone else in the crowd saw that too, which is why the whole like, ‘Oh, deceptively edited clip of Biden freezing.’ He wasn’t actually freezing in that moment. But the rest of the thing was bad.”
