Bob Woodward, a longtime editor at The Washington Post and Watergate reporter, expressed serious concerns about Biden’s dismal debate performance, likening the president’s gaffe to a “political hydrogen bomb.”
“I think the answer here is to report and to very aggressively seek explanation, what happened here,” Woodward, 81, told MSNBC’s Air Melber on Friday.
Woodward said Biden’s debate was “so bad, so awful” that the American people have a right to know what’s going on.
“We don’t want this to be made public in a book or a memoir a few years from now or 10 years from now. We need to know now,” he argued.
“I sat there watching it and I couldn’t believe it. I said, not only is this a political hydrogen bomb for him and the Democratic Party, but what happened? What happened?” the veteran journalist lamented.
Woodward explained that calls for Biden to drop out of the race were now “inevitable”.
He speculated that the president may have been upset after a “heated argument” with a staff member during debate preparations.
Biden spoke in a noticeably soft, raspy voice at the podium, and sources close to the White House claimed he had a cold.
While aides have already denied that Biden would consider dropping out of the race, Woodward said more effort should be put into determining what caused Biden’s debate failure.
“If you stop and think about it for a second, when a building explodes in the center of any city, people talk about what happened, and then people talk about how it happened, why it happened. This was a massive disaster and that’s what bothers me so much,” he said.
