Calls for withdrawal after Biden’s humiliating defeat

The double victory that I had hoped for on Thursday — Biden over Trump in the CNN debate and the US soccer team over Panama in Copa America — never happened, as both Biden and the soccer team went down in humiliating defeats.

In fact, both bombed, and their fall was heard loud and clear across this nation. Biden had no answer to a vigorous Trump, who got away with a long series of his usual lies but who seemed much younger, energetic, well-spoken and disciplined. And the US soccer team, reduced to ten players after a disastrous red card to Timothy Weah early in the match, turned a likely victory over an inferior team into a 1-2 defeat. The Americans now risk elimination from the tournament if they don’t beat Uruguay next week. It was an embarrassing defeat.

For the president it was a “painful evening,” writes Robert Reich, professor and a leading liberal voice.

Biden should now “withdraw from the race,” according to influential commentator Andrew Sullivan.

Their words are echoed by many, as the Democratic Party and its supporters are reeling from what Steven Schmidt, an anti-Trump former Republican, calls “a disaster of the first magnitude” for Biden.

Biden’s performance, writes veteran journalist Joe Klein, was “worse than disastrous. It was sad, it was humiliating. Biden looked like a hospice patient who got lost on his way to the bathroom.”

Klein adds his voice to all those who think change must now happen:

So my hunch that Biden would come through, as he so often had done in big moments, turned out to be wrong, completely wrong. Biden, 81, did show his age, and although it had been much discussed, many were surprised, some even shocked.

There was panic in the reactions from leading Democrats as well as grass root