From the very start, President Biden’s debate performance was not good. He was stuttering, speaking quietly, meandering in his train of thought, and, supposedly, under the weather. Bidenworld had hoped the president would use the debate to resoundingly dispel lingering concerns voters have about his age, but the performance turned those concerns up to a crisis level instead.

In fact, it was so not good that nearly every postgame panel on every major network blasted some version of the chryon: “Democrats in crisis no longer believe Biden should be nominee.” It was so not good that CNN’s Van Jones was tearing up just talking about it.

Biden’s debate faceplant immediately cleaved the Democratic Party into two camps: unnamed Democrats who seem to suddenly believe that Biden will cost them the presidency and cannot continue in his campaign, and named Democrats who are either saying nothing or putting on a brave face trying to spin what happened on Thursday night as passable. (Said CNN’s John King after the debate’s conclusion: Democrats are wondering “should we go to the White House and ask the president to step aside? The other conversations are: Should prominent Democrats go public with that call because they feel that debate was so terrible?”)

Among that second camp of Democrats—the ones putting on a brave face—are Biden’s surrogates, those who were tasked with the unenviable burden of trying to say something good about his performance and slow the fast-rising panic about the president’s chances in November. It was no easy work.

No one had it tougher than California governor Gavin Newsom, who has made........

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