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When the most deranged and disturbing presidential debate in our history was over, the event’s cable hosts, CNN, tossed to mild-mannered John King for instant reaction. The silver-haired anchor, whose normal specialty is fussing over the “Magic Wall” electoral map on election nights, performed a grimmer duty last night:

There is a deep, a wide, and a very aggressive panic in the Democratic Party… It involves party strategists, it involves elected officials, it involves fundraisers. And they’re having conversations about the president’s performance, which they think was dismal… They’re having conversations as to what they should do about it. Some of those conversations include, “Should we go to the White House, and ask the president to step aside?”

Whoa. Murder on the CNN Express continued around a table of analysts who’ve been telling us for years that Joe Biden is a fit president. Each now echoed King. “The panic that I am hearing from Democrats is not like anything that I have heard,” concurred Abby Phillip. “They are now seeing a President… they do not necessarily believe can do this for another four years.” Barack Obama’s right hand David Axelrod said: “I can’t argue with either of them about how Democratic leaders are reacting.” Van Jones, playing the schmaltz role, offered tearfully, “I love Joe Biden,” but “We’re going to want to see him consider taking a different course now.”
On MSNBC, whose brand is more hysteric loyalism, Joy Reid read the same script:

My phone really never stopped buzzing throughout. The universal reaction was somewhere approaching panic… It’s not a full drumbeat yet, but there is talk of… I just happen to know a lot of politicians. They all believe that they have a unique ability to run the race that they passionately want to run, and I know for a fact that Joe Biden believes he is the only person who can beat Donald Trump… The problem is, after tonight, his party doesn’t believe that.

Was that sentiment really “universal”? Former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe seemed to say yes. Introduced by a crestfallen Rachel Maddow as someone who’d been on the phone all night with “muckety-mucks” and people “we gingerly call the donor class,” Plouffe laid down a grim sound bite. “It’s a DEFCON 1 moment,” he said. Regarding Trump and Biden, he added. “They’re three years apart. They seemed about thirty.”