Biden comes out swinging in first speech after presidential debate with Trump
Attendees note ‘night and day’ difference between campaign stop in North Carolina and ‘lackluster’ debate showing
Ryan Thornburg in Raleigh, North Carolina
Fri 28 Jun 2024
In what several supporters described as a “night and day” difference from his performance in last night’s debate, President Joe Biden on Friday vowed to keep fighting against what he framed as an existential threat to America.
In his first campaign stop following the debate, Biden showed off a louder and more dynamic voice at the North Carolina state fairgrounds in Raleigh.
“I know what millions of Americans know,” Biden said. “When you get knocked down, you get back up.”
During
the 15-minute speech in a sweltering building that saw at least one
person faint, Biden ran through a list of issues from high-speed
internet to border security, but spent a good deal of his time
denouncing Donald Trump’s honesty and integrity.
“I
don’t walk as easily as I used to, I don’t speak as smoothly as I used
to, I don’t debate as well as I used to,” Biden said, addressing the
widespread criticism of his Thursday performance. “But I know what I do
know. I know how to tell the truth.”
Repeating a
line from the debate, he said of Trump, his rival for the White House,
“I spent 90 minutes on a stage debating a guy who has the morals of an
alley cat.” Biden added: “I think he [Trump] set a new record for the
number of lies told at a single debate.”
Although
there was enough empty room in some of the bleachers for people to move
around easily, the crowd shouted an encouraging: “Yes, you can!” when
Biden began to talk about how well he could do the job of president in
what would be his mid-80s.
If some in the crowd
came to the rally holding their breath, many seemed relieved to see
more energy from the Democratic president.
“Night and day,” said Brenda Pollard,
a delegate to the Democratic national convention from Durham, North
Carolina. “I mean, to me, today was who he is. And there it is, just
like I just said, he’s energized by the people. Last night he didn’t
have that. That’s no excuse, but I think it played a factor in it.”
Pollard
was one of the Biden supporters who met the president on the tarmac
when his plane landed at Raleigh-Durham international airport at about
2am Friday.
Pollard said she would not consider
nominating any other candidate but Biden at the convention and had not
heard any “serious” talk about doing so, despite many voters, pundits
and operatives suggesting that was the Democrats’ only way forward.
Biden
played to the North Carolina crowd after he was introduced by the
state’s popular and outgoing Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, who at one
point was himself mentioned as a possible 2024 presidential candidate.
“I want you to know, I’m not promising not to take Roy away from North Carolina,” Biden said.
One
of the hallmarks of Cooper’s time in office has been his negotiation
with the state’s Republican-controlled legislature to expand Medicaid
coverage last year. Margaret Kimber, a grandmother from Wendell, North
Carolina, gave Biden much credit for the expansion as well.
“It
helps with the insurance, the supplements are fantastic,” she said
while leaning against her walker after the rally. “And without them,
whew!”
Pollard also said that Biden’s support of social security and Medicare were some of the most important issues for her.
“The
loans are for the next generation. That’s our future coming in,” she
said. “But we’re seniors and we’ve invested in this country and we have
paid in. And now we just want that. It’s not an entitlement. We paid for
it. It’s ours. And President Trump wants to take it.”
Kimber
said that the issues that matter most to the young people she knows are
school safety and gun violence. She said she thought Trump’s focus on
immigration restrictions was just an appeal to fear.
“Because
people were pissed off that the borders were open, Trump is using that
as a tool to scare the people of the United States, and he’s using scare
tactics to make people think that if we don’t close the borders we’re
going to be overrun,” Kimber said. “And we’re going to be overrun with
guns and violence. And we already have guns and violence.”
Wesley
Boykin, who ran as a Democrat for the state legislature in 2022 in
rural Duplin county, said that education, safety and healthcare were the
issues that drew him most to Biden. Boykin said that as a Black man, he
felt fear when Trump was president and no longer has the same fear
during the Biden administration.
Boykin also
said the Raleigh speech was a welcome departure from what he called a
“lackluster” performance by the president on Thursday, especially the
first seven minutes.
“I concluded nine o’clock
is not the appropriate time,” he said. “After he basically woke up –
after that seven minutes – he was more like he was today. And I realized
he didn’t get a great deal of sleep.”
Boykin
and others said that economic issues were not as important to them in
this campaign as issues of character. Biden hit Trump on both fronts,
reusing his “morals of an alley cat” line and calling his challenger
“Donald ‘Herbert Hoover’ Trump”, after the Republican president who was
in office at the onset of the Great Depression.
Tina
Bruner, a Democratic precinct secretary in Raleigh and mother of three
school-age children, said Biden’s handling of the pandemic demonstrated
both his character and what she said was his superior economic policy.
“The
way Trump handled the pandemic was terrifying, and I immediately felt
like we’re going to make it out of this whenever Joe took over. The
vaccine rollout happened and the way school lunches were funded for
everyone. I don’t think I could have counted on schoolchildren to be fed
by Trump.”
“So, yes, my life definitely felt safer, my family felt safer because of Joe Biden,” she said.