Former US First Lady Jill Biden has given a personal account of the night of Joe Biden's heavily criticised televised debate, speaking at a book event in Florida as she promotes her new memoir. Her recollection took in both the immediate aftermath of the debate and the hours that followed on the campaign trail.
She recalled that Biden himself recognised straight away how badly it had gone. According to her account, when they met just after he came off the stage he looked at her and admitted he had really messed up, and she told him plainly that he had. She added that she would not repeat his exact words because children were in the audience.
Asked about a passage in the book that raised the question of whether Biden might have taken something before the debate, she said she had not asked him about it. She made light of the suggestion, joking that people sometimes reach for NyQuil instead of DayQuil by mistake, and said the doctors present had reassured her that he was fine.
Despite the debate, she said the campaign pressed on within hours. That same night the couple went to a hotel where supporters were waiting, then stopped at a Waffle House, before flying overnight to North Carolina and landing at around three in the morning, where a band, lights and hundreds of supporters greeted them on the tarmac.
She framed the debate as an aberration rather than the norm. In the days that followed, she noted, Biden spoke to NATO and took questions as the campaign rolled on, and she suggested people had not fully put together what the period leading up to the debate had been like.
She was also critical of how he had been prepared. She said she thought it had been a little reckless of his staff to schedule him the way they did in the run-up and then have him take part in the debate, pointing to the demands placed on him in the two weeks beforehand.