The unusually early timing of the debate meant that it coincided with another milestone on the American political and media calendar: the Aspen Ideas Festival, the annual summit of elites and do-gooders (and elites masquerading as do-gooders) held every summer in the shadow of the Rockies. Organizers of the festival, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, arranged a watch party, where a pro-Biden crowd gathered tonight inside a jam-packed pavilion.
Outside, an overcast afternoon gave way to a light drizzle, providing a sense of mountain calm. But inside, nerves ran high. Everyone I spoke to seemed to agree: Biden needed a performance.
I sat next to Denny Bales, a cardiologist who came to the festival from Hawaii.
“It feels like the fate of the world is riding on this one event,” he told me.
The watch party played out like it would in Park Slope or any other liberal enclave, a steady supply of mocking laughter for Trump and eager cheers for Biden.
But when Biden came out with a hoarse voice and lost his train of thought early on, the crowd squirmed and groaned.
Biden rallied somewhat, making it to the first commercial break without any more serious pratfalls. Bales was relieved. Sort of.
“He rebounded,” he said. “But he still looks like a sick old man.”
There was palpable anxiety about the debate here in Aspen this week: the fear of a second Trump presidency felt in near-equal measure with doubts over Biden’s ability to stop it.
Hours before Biden and Trump took the stage, the Democratic strategist James Carville channeled the mood around the festival campus.
“I’m scared. I’m nervous. I’m afraid,” Carville said in a Q&A with the Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart.
Carville was confident that Biden would be prepared, but…
“Preparation is one thing,” he said. “Execution is another thing.”
Biden is a “great guy,” Carville told Capehart, but “not a great communicator.”
“He’s not Obama or Reagan,” he said.
At a Q&A earlier in the afternoon, Katie Couric took the pre-debate temperature of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
“How nervous are you?” Couric asked.
Whitmer paused for a few seconds.
“I mean, you know, I’m nervous about everything,” she said. The crowd laughed uneasily.
