President Joe Biden bounced back from his disastrous debate against former President Donald Trump with a powerful campaign appearance that a former White House strategist said made him look like a different man.
A split-screen video presentation by CNN contrasted a pale and fumbling Biden searching for words and concepts at Thursday's debate with a clip of him appearing animated and driven the the following day.
At the rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, Biden acknowledged that at 81, "I don't debate as well as I used to" but said he wouldn't be running "if I didn't believe with all my heart and soul I can do this job."
"I know — like millions of Americans know — when you get knocked down, you get back up," he said, raising a fist as his supporters clapped and cheered.
CNN political commentator David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama, said Friday night that "it's hard to recognize the guy we saw today in the guy we saw last night."
Axelrod also said the back-to-back performances "reminded me of the 2012 — the first debate for President Obama, which didn't go well."
"And one of the things that we stressed was we had an event scheduled the next day" for Obama, he said on "The Source with Kaitlan Collins."
"You gotta be pumped. You gotta be pumped and show life, and so on. So this looked very familiar to me," Axelrod recalled.
Biden, who was aided by teleprompters on Friday, coughed repeatedly during his address, underscording what campaign aides reportedly said were symptoms of a cold that plagued him during Thursday night's CNN-sponsored debate.
That event featured an especially cringeworthy portion in which Biden appeared befuddled, repeatedly correcting statistics he'd cited and rambling about healthcare and the COVID-19 pandemic before saying that "we finally beat Medicare."
His poor performance led the New York Times editorial board to call for him to drop his reelection bid to "protect the soul of the nation" from a second Trump term it said would threaten "nothing less than the future of American democracy."
Trump was widely perceived to have won the face-off, although fact-checkers accused him of making numerous false statements, including claiming credit for the "greatest economy in history" when federal figures show growth has been stronger under Biden.
"He told a lie like once every 100 seconds," former Trump White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci told CNN.
