Bob Woodward, a Watergate reporter and longtime deputy editor at The Washington Post, said Biden’s debate performance was a “political hydrogen bomb” and that the public has a right to know what really happened.
Woodward Participated After Friday’s debate, MSNBC’s Air Melber said the debate performance was “so bad, so terrible” and that reporters must be demanding some kind of explanation from the staff.
“I think the answer here is to report and to very aggressively seek an explanation – what happened here,” Woodward said. “We don’t want it to be published in some book or memoir a few years from now, or even 10 years from now. We need to know now.”
Woodward speculated that in the run-up to the debate – a likely Biden campaign strategy given that it was the Biden campaign that suggested the debate in the first place – the president may have gotten into a “heated argument” with his staff.
Either way, Woodward argued, the public needed to know.
The president came on stage with a raspy voice and a slight cough, stuttering over his answers and sometimes not finishing sentences. A source familiar with Biden’s work said the president had been suffering from a cold.
Biden’s debate performance has raised widespread concern among Democrats about whether he can beat former President Trump in the polls this fall, with some calling for Biden to step aside and give someone else a chance to beat Trump.
Woodward said calls to suspend Biden from office were “inevitable” because of his poor performance.
“I sat there watching it and I couldn’t believe it. I said, ‘Not only is this a political hydrogen bomb for him and the Democratic Party, but what happened? What happened?'” he said.
Woodward said calls for the president to step down were not hasty, but that more effort should be put into demanding an explanation behind the debate performance.
“If you stop and think about it for a second, when a building explodes in the center of any city, people talk about what happened, and then people talk about how it happened, why it happened. I’m very interested in this because this was a disaster of this magnitude,” Woodward said.
