Nothing to See Here? White House Portrays Biden’s Debate Performance as a Blip

Critics of the approach say it risks making President Biden and his campaign seem woefully out of touch with the voters they need to win.

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President Biden is not trying to convince voters that he won the debate or that his performance was something to brag about. But he has spent the past three days downplaying its impact.

Seventy-two hours after the debate in Atlanta last week, President Biden and those closest to him have settled on the same strategy police officers use to shoo bystanders away from a car crash: “Nothing to see here.”

According to the talking points being repeated by the president’s aides and surrogates, the debate was a 90-minute blip in a long campaign. Mr. Biden didn’t have “a great night,” as he told donors Saturday, but fund-raising is going strong and he has already bounced back.

Aides have been pushing a similar message for more than a year, as polls have shown that voters are worried about the president’s age. They have brushed off such concerns, calling them little more than a creation of the media and the MAGA movement supporting the campaign of former President Donald J. Trump.

Jen O’Malley Dillon, the president’s top campaign strategist, said on Saturday that any drop in the polls would be the result of “overblown media narratives.” Senator John Fetterman, Democrat of Pennsylvania, dismissed anxiety about the president’s performance, saying on “Fox News Sunday” that “it’s like one debate.”

And yet, like the bystanders at the car crash, voters do not need to be told what happened during the face-off with Mr. Trump. They saw it with their own eyes.

“Telling people they didn’t see what they saw is not the way to respond to this,” Ben Rhodes, who was a top foreign policy adviser to President Barack Obama, wrote on social media an hour after the debate ended on Thursday.

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