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President Joe Biden appeared to acknowledge his poor debate performance Thursday against former President Donald Trump but went on to insist that he would not be running for reelection if he didn’t think he was able to do the demanding job.

Following his widely criticized and shaky performance on the debate stage, Biden declared to a crowd in Durham, North Carolina that the years have taken a toll on him during his first campaign rally since the debate, the Washington Times reported on Friday.

“I don’t walk as easily as I used to. I don’t talk as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to. But I know what I do know. I know how to tell the Truth,” the 81-year-old president said. “I know how to get things done.”

“I give you my word as a Biden, I would not be running again if I did not believe with all my heart and soul that I could do this job, because, quite frankly, the stakes are too high,” he added.

The Times added:

The rally in North Carolina was partly aimed at limiting the fallout from the debate, which cemented voters’ doubts about his fitness for office. Mr. Biden repeatedly froze, misspoke and trailed off during the 90-minute face-off on CNN.

Aided by teleprompters and a speech rife with one-liners attacking Mr. Trump, the president revisited several themes that he muddled through on the debate stage.

White House officials have blamed a lingering cold for his low energy, weak voice and coughing while on stage against Mr. Trump in a CNN studio in Atlanta.

The media landscape erupted in response to Biden’s horrific performance during the CNN Presidential Debate.

Responses have ranged from “dismal” critiques to outspoken requests from the left for him to get out of the 2024 contest.

“I was on the phones for some of it after that became clear and there is a conversation happening inside Biden’s circle, and certainly a much more frank conversation happening inside the Democratic coalition,” MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace said following the debate. “And I think there will be stories of a lot of concern about the performance tonight.”

Politico relayed even more dire perspectives, quoting Democratic operatives saying, “Biden is toast.” Another piece quoted an adviser of big Democratic donors that was even more blunt.

“Our only hope is that he bows out, we have a brokered convention, or dies,” the donor adviser said. “Otherwise we are f**king dead.”

“I mean it’s not great all around,” a down-ballot Democrat for statewide office told Politico. “Our president has a speech impediment, a cold, and is 81.”

“No one expected a master class in debating from Joe Biden, but no one expected this nose dive,” a senior aide to top Democratic officials told the publication. “He was bad on message, bad on substance, bad on counter punching, bad on presentation, bad on non-verbals. There was no bright spot in this debate for him. The only bright spot is that this happened in June and not October.”

CNN’s John King highlighted the “very aggressive panic in the Democratic Party” that started in the early stages of the debate.

“This was a game-changing debate in the sense that right now, as we speak, there is a deep, a wide and a very aggressive panic in the Democratic Party. It started minutes into the debate and it continues right now,” King said.

“It involves party strategists, it involves elected officials, it involves fundraisers. And they‘re having conversations about the president’s performance, which they think was dismal, which they think will hurt other people down the party in the ticket, and they‘re having conversations about what they should do about it,” King added.

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