If President Joe Biden is on his last leg as a candidate, you’d never know it by his effort to energize Democratic troops Friday at a campaign rally in Raleigh, North Carolina.
“I know I’m not a young man. Let’s state the obvious” Biden said, in a nod to the halting performance he delivered at Thursday night’s debate in Atlanta.
He paused, and chants of “Joe!” began to sweep the crowd.
“Folks, I don’t walk as easy 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 admitted. “But I know what I do know: I know how to tell the truth, I know right from wrong, and I know how to do this job, I know how to get things done.”
“And I know, like millions of Americans know: When you get knocked down, you get back up!,” he concluded, with an upward thrust of his fist.
RELATED STORY:Â CNN gave Trump a sledgehammer and thanked him for destroying the debate
Watch:
Jeez, where was this guy on Thursday? Certainly, that’s what throngs of Biden supporters will wonder as they drink in the president’s infectious vigor less than 24 hours after he reinforced for millions of Americans the most vexing question of his reelection: Is Joe up to the job?
And while Biden’s Friday rally, however convincing, can’t undo his failure to vanquish that question at the debate, what he did do was put another question to rest: Is Biden ready to step aside?
Nope—not exactly. Rather, Biden’s speech was a call to arms, chock full of what one might imagine were a series of barbs he had planned to hurl at Donald Trump the night before.
RELATED STORY:Â Biden needs to fix what happened at the debate
Biden also poked fun at Trump for the gushers of lies that poured forth from him throughout the debate.
“Did you see Trump last night?” Biden queried. “May guess is he set—I mean this sincerely—he set a new record for the most lies told in a single debate.”
Biden also reminded attendees about the stakes of the election in crisp, clean prose.
“Your freedom, your democracy, America itself is at stake,” Biden warned.
He skewered Trump’s string of legal transgressions.
“When I thought about his 34 felony convictions, his sexual assault on a woman in a public place, his being fined $400 million for business fraud, I thought to myself, Donald Trump isn’t just a convicted felon. Donald Trump is a one-man crime wave,” Biden charged.
“He’s got more trials coming up,” Biden added, alluding to the next chapter in the comeback story he’s still working on.
This wasn’t the speech of a guy who’s down on his luck. This was the speech of a guy who nearly got knocked out of the ring and showed up to fight his way back in.
Welcome back, Joe. You should come around more often.
