President Joe Biden says he’s not leaving the race for the presidency just because he had a bad debate, which he blames on cold medication and fatigue from a week of international travel.

“Let me say this as clearly as I possibly can, as simply and straightforward as I can: I am running,” Biden told his staff on a Wednesday call. “No one is pushing me out. I’m not leaving. I’m in this race to the end and we’re going to win.”

Former Republican Congressman Joe Walsh, who had been banging the drums for Biden to step aside for a ticket that would put Vice President at the top, relented upon hearing Biden’s forceful response — but he had sharp words for the President in his election fight with Donald Trump.

“OK. Fine,” Walsh tweeted. “But if you’re still ‘running,’ get the heck out there and RUN. Don’t TELL us you’re running, SHOW us you’re running. Get out there and take questions from the media and voters, no teleprompter, no script, just take questions from all comers. Day after day.”

Forner Republican campaign strategist, Lincoln Project founder and author Stuart Stevens told Democratic hand-wringers to “rally around Joe Biden and get about the business of winning the race.”

“I would be advising President Biden to get out and campaign,” Stevens said on MSNBC. “Do town halls, do interviews, do a 72-hour blitz of swing states. Do midnight tarmac rallies at airports. You can’t talk your way out of these kind of situations. You can only prove that you are capable of doing the job, and you’re the best candidate.

“I don’t really think a lot of people watched this debate going in saying that they were going to vote for Joe Biden and left the debate thinking that they were going to vote for Donald Trump.

“Donald Trump had abysmal debate. I mean, he said crazy stuff, like most Americans were against Roe v. Wade, he said that there were states out there where it was legal to kill babies. This is just nuts-as-a-bunny stuff, and they should be out there hammering Trump with this, and use the Supreme Court ruling that gives him more power to raise the stakes in the election.”

Stevens added: “Isn’t this kind of odd requesting whether or not Joe Biden is capable of being President? Well, he is President. So then you are fair to ask: Is he doing a good job? And he arguably has had the most successful first term of anybody since World War II. So it seems a little specious to say, ‘OK, 90 minutes, we’re going to throw out all this other information that we have of a wildly successful presidency under very difficult circumstances.’ ...

“I get that everybody likes the idea that somebody knew would be good. That’s always the case. We don’t sell cars in America by saying they’re just as good as last year, something always has to be better.

“But this isn’t fantasy football. It’s deadly serious for the future of democracy, and I think that Democrats should rally around Joe Biden and get about the business of winning the race.”