Nothing to see here? White House portrays Biden’s debate performance as a blip

Seventy-two hours after last week’s debate in Atlanta, President Biden and those close to him have decided on the same strategy that police officers use to scare away bystanders at a car crash: “There’s nothing to see here.”

According to talking points repeated by the president’s aides and surrogates, the debate was a 90-minute break in a long campaign. Biden didn’t have a “great night,” as he told donors Saturday, but fundraising is going well and he’s back again.

Aides have been spreading a similar message for more than a year as polls have shown voters concerned about the president’s age. They have dismissed such concerns, calling them little more than a creation of the media and the MAGA movement that supports former President Donald J. Trump’s campaign.

Jen O’Malley Dillon, the president’s top campaign strategist, said Saturday that any drop in the polls would be the result of “overblown media stories.” Sen. John Fetterman, Democrat of Pennsylvania, dismissed concerns about the president’s performance, saying on “Fox News Sunday” that “it’s just one debate.”

And yet, like the bystanders at the car crash, voters don’t need to be told what happened during the confrontation with Mr. Trump. They saw it with their own eyes.

“Telling people they didn’t see what they saw is not the way to respond,” Ben Rhodes, a top foreign policy adviser to President Barack Obama, wrote on social media an hour after the debate ended Thursday.

The president isn’t trying to convince voters that he won the debate or that his performance was anything to brag about. But he has spent the past three days downplaying its impact, blaming the media for failing to report Trump’s lies and insisting that voters thought his rival did worse.

At fundraisers, speeches and other appearances, Mr. Biden has used teleprompters — something he was unable to use during the debate — and his aides have often shielded him from reporters. On Sunday, he was sequestered with his family and top aides at Camp David, the presidential retreat in the Maryland mountains, for a visit that had been planned for months.

“Since the debate, the polls have shown a little movement, and we’ve even gone a step further,” Biden told donors at a fundraiser in the Hamptons on Saturday evening. Journalists all made a mistake by talking about his actions, the president told the room full of supporters.

“The biggest thing was his lies,” Mr. Biden said, referring to Mr. Trump. “People remembered how bad things were during his presidency, how much they hated him.”

Quentin Fulks, Biden’s deputy campaign manager, was even more direct during the staff’s weekly conference call.

“Fundamentally nothing has changed in last night’s election,” he insisted.

That may turn out to be true, but it will likely take some time for the quality polls to bear this out. But meanwhile, critics of the approach say it risks leaving the president and his campaign woefully out of touch with — and even dismissive of — the voters they need to defeat Mr. Trump in November.

Tommy Vietor, a communications alumnus of Obama’s administration and one of the hosts of the popular podcast “Pod Save America,” said the campaign can’t get its way out of this.

“You can’t say the future of American democracy is at stake and then tell everyone who was concerned about last night’s debate to stop wetting the bed or grow a spine,” he wrote on social media, adding profanity and calling it “insulting to people who care deeply about this country and know what is at stake.”

The challenge for members of Mr. Biden’s team in the coming days will be to convince Democrats that the campaign’s version of reality is, well, real. They will try to prevent more of his allies from calling for Mr. Biden to step aside, as several have already done. And they will work to refocus the race on Mr. Trump, who is planning an even more extreme agenda than his first term.

Ultimately, though, it will be up to voters to decide what they believe. And while Thursday’s debate was watched by fewer people than in previous years, 51.3 million viewers still tuned in to watch the president’s performance — the largest audience for any campaign event so far.

David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, wrote this weekend that Mr. Biden “broke down on CNN, in front of tens of millions of his fellow Americans.” Remaining as the Democratic candidate, he wrote, “would be an act not only of self-deception but of national danger.”

“It was a painful experience watching the debate on Thursday and seeing Biden rendered senseless on stage,” Remnick said. “And it will erase forever all those vague and qualified descriptions from White House insiders about good and bad days.”