‘It pains me’: How Biden’s devastating debate went over at an assisted living facility

CHEVY CHASE, Maryland — Just before the first debate between the two oldest major-party presidential candidates in history, a TV ad attacking President Joe Biden asked if his response to inflation is “dishonesty or dementia?”

Watching from an assisted living facility just outside Washington, Barbara Goldberg, 81, groaned and put her head in her hands. The candidates’ ages, she said, are “not really relevant to the other issues that are more important.”

And then, over the course of the next 90 minutes — as the residents of Brighton Gardens of Friendship Heights popped Skittles and repeatedly asked for the volume on the community room TV to be turned up — age suddenly became all that mattered.

When Biden, 81, appeared to lose his train of thought and said, inexplicably, “We finally beat Medicare,” Goldberg put her head in her hands again.

“We finally beat Medicare?” she asked.

For Biden, it was a disaster. His allies had seen the debate as his best chance yet to ease concerns about his age, a persistent liability for his campaign. And the perception of older voters — who turn up to vote at higher levels any other age group — is critical to the Democratic president. He lost voters 65 and older to Donald Trump by 5 percentage points in 2020, but is courting them aggressively in the run-up to November.

Nothing his contemporaries saw here Thursday helped his case.

“I think that he is rushing it, and he’s not looking at the camera for the most part,” said Meg Maguire, 81, who was visiting the facility to watch the debate with her husband.

She said, “In terms of just physical relationship to the camera, Trump is doing better,” even if, as she put it, “Trump says garbage.”

“I do think Biden’s age is showing at this debate, and it pains me,” she added.

Goldberg agreed. “I don’t like to see [Biden’s] gaffes, but I don’t like to see Trump going haywire and cockamamie either,” she said.

Trump, at 78, has had his own stumbles in recent months. While arguing at a campaign rally recently that Biden “should take a cognitive test like I did,” he flubbed the name of Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas), his former physician, calling him “Doc Ronny Johnson.” But at the debate, while his lies drew criticism, Trump’s age was nearly a non-factor. In a Gallup poll released this week, some two-thirds of Americans said Biden is too old to be president, compared to 37 percent who said the same of Trump.

And by the first commercial break on Thursday — when at least three residents here had nodded off — the damage to Biden had been done.

“Let’s face it, a debate is a performance,” said Claire Moses, 83. And she offered a blunt assessment of the one that Biden was turning in.

“Biden is not a good performer,” Moses said. “And I’m very sad tonight because I think that Biden is a great president, and he is a great president because of what he has done, what he has accomplished, not how he speaks.”

But when he did speak, even viewers sympathetic to Biden here grew concerned.

They watched as the moderators asked both Trump and Biden how they would handle being the oldest presidents in history, to which the candidates bantered over their golf performances.

“Let’s not act like children,” Trump said.

“You are a child,” Biden replied.

Maguire turned to a Gen-Z POLITICO reporter, shaking her head.

“I can’t believe this is the world we’re leaving to you,” she said.