The Weekly Sift

Last week, I covered the Biden debate fiasco and discussed what the next steps should be. The gist of what I said was that as an aging person myself (67) and having watched a number of other people age, what I saw in Biden — stumbling over words, not remembering names, and getting unfocused when he’s sick or tired — did not necessarily bother me all that much. Those symptoms seemed (to me, at least) unrelated to dementia or more worrisome problems of aging.

But other people, I pointed out, are in a position to see much more, and we should pay attention to what they have to say. As of last week, they weren’t saying much, and those who were talking were standing by Biden.

This week, though, some of the reports I wasn’t seeing last week started to come in. Some elected Democrats — though none of the heavyweights (Jeffries, Schumer, Pelosi, Obama …) — called on Biden to withdraw from the race. And reports from insiders started to leak, saying that the symptoms we saw during the debate have happened often in the past. (Though they’re not reporting anything worse than we saw in the debate, and they’re not telling me what I really want to know: When Biden loses focus, how long does it take him to snap back? Does a five-minute break and a cup of coffee do the trick, or is he done for the day?)

Also, polls have come in measuring the post-debate slippage: Biden has gone from more-or-less even to about 3 points behind in the polling averages (though individual polls show better or worse results). Also, where early polls had shown other Democrats running far behind Trump, more recent ones show them in more-or-less the same position as Biden: behind, but close. Michelle Obama actually clobbers Trump 50%-39%, but she has shown no interest in running. (It’s common for candidates to look good when they show no interest, only to lose support when they eventually run.) Kamala Harris trails by only 1%, belying the claim that she can’t win. Other Democrats trail by 3-6%.

Friday, Biden did something critics were insisting he needed to do: Sit down for a one-on-one interview with an independent journalist. He talked to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos for 22 minutes, an interview that I found frustrating to watch because it told me so little. Basically, Biden was the guy we elected in 2020: He occasionally had to hunt for the words he wanted, and sometimes he started one sentence and finished another (something I’ve been known to do), but nothing seemed fundamentally wrong with his thinking processes.

But 22 minutes isn’t that impressive, and I was disappointed in Stephanopoulos. Yes, the point of the interview was to test Biden’s sharpness. But couldn’t that purpose have been better accomplished, and the public better served, by asking him difficult questions about inflation, immigration, climate change, and so on? Instead, Stephanopoulos spent 22 minutes asking different versions of the same question: What would have to happen for you to quit the race?

No one should expect any politician to answer that question forthrightly. Quitting a political campaign is like asking for a divorce: You don’t talk about it until you’re ready to do it. In every election cycle, primary candidates swear they’re “in it to win it” right up until the moment they tell their staffs to go home. If Biden were to admit he was thinking about quitting, that would freeze his campaign, stop donors in their tracks, and start a chain reaction that would inevitably lead to him leaving the race. If he’s not ready to do it, he shouldn’t talk about it. No politician would.

Weirdly, commentators seemed not to understand this basic fact of politics, so a common response was that Biden is “in denial” about his situation.

For what it’s worth: CNN offered Trump a similar interview, and he refused. Trump only does interviews on friendly venues like Fox News or Newsmax, and often those are edited before the public sees them. And although Trump complained constantly about how his Manhattan trial was keeping him off the campaign trail, he isn’t actually campaigning that hard now that he can. His schedule for this week shows only two events, one tomorrow and one Saturday. In short, far from showing the youthful vigor Biden is said to lack, Trump has a less rigorous campaign schedule than Biden does — and Biden has a day job.

On the question of whether Biden should be the candidate, I’m less certain than I was last week. I continue to think switching candidates is a messier process than many commentators — I’m looking at you, Ezra Klein — imagine. Switching to anybody but Harris would be suicidal if Harris wasn’t all-in on the plan. And why should she be? Josh Marshall raises an important point in that regard: Who are the convention delegates who would be making that decision, and what small-d democratic legitimacy do they have?

[T]his process [where Harris is skipped over] simply has no legitimacy. And what angers me about these columnists is just the lack of humility. What are they talking about? On what basis and with what legitimacy or authority are they coming up with this fantasy process? We’re way, way off the rails of democratic legitimacy here. In a case like this it behooves us, both politically and far more substantively, to search for sources of legitimacy where we can and make our choices accordingly. And the obvious and clear ones all point to Kamala Harris. The American people chose her as Biden’s replacement in 2020. And while she wasn’t technically nominated for VP during this year’s primary process, in effect she was since Democrats chose Biden again fully knowing she was part of the package. Her name is literally in the name of the campaign.

Finally, it’s hard to discuss what Biden and his party should do next without acknowledging the overwhelming media stampede trying to push him out of the race. I don’t know where this is coming from, but I can’t remember anything quite like it. Monday, the Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity — which (as I covered in the previous post) isn’t quite the End of the Republic by itself, but could be a significant step in that direction — barely got air time because speculation about Biden crowded it out. Tuesday, USA Today published a topsy-turvy article that framed the immunity decision as a distraction from Biden’s troubles.

So here’s where I am at the current moment, understanding that new information keeps coming in: I don’t yet see anything in Biden that would keep him from continuing to do the good job he’s been doing these last several years. Going forward, he may have to work less and rest more, but I suspect that even then he would be working far harder than Trump ever did when he was president.

Politically, the question is closer: Biden has something to prove now, and he may not be a skilled enough politician to prove it. At a minimum, he needs more exposure like the Stephanopoulos interview, and he needs to go without any public senior moments, even minor ones, for the rest of the campaign. Can he do that? I’m not sure.

I’m particularly unsure he can prove what he needs to prove in the face of intense opposition from the likes the the NYT, CNN, and other mainstream media outlets. Maybe Obama had the skills to turn something like this around, or maybe Bill Clinton in his prime. But Biden has never been in that class.

No one should minimize the risks in either direction.

I often hear the suggestion that if Biden would just do X, that would put the controversy to bed. So why doesn’t he? Isn’t he just admitting he can’t? (A few days before the Stephanopoulos interview, X was “sit down for a one-on-one interview”. During it, X was “undergo an independent medical evaluation that included neurological and cognitive tests and release the results to the American people.”) But when has such a strategy ever worked? Does anyone ever do X and get the response, “Thank you. We can move on now.”? I have never seen it. Doing X just leads to an explanation of why X wasn’t good enough, followed by a demand that you do Y.

Similarly, the Democratic Party is now hearing that we can move on to talk about the substantive issues of this campaign (democracy vs. authoritarianism, climate change, abortion, Gaza, Ukraine, competition with China, immigration, all the ways Trump will abuse the Supreme Court’s newly invented presidential immunity …) once we do X, namely, replace Biden as our candidate.

Is that true? I doubt it. So does Michelangelo Signorile:

Don’t fall for trap. If Democrats listen to the New York Times and try to replace Biden, NYT will have a new narrative: Democrats in chaos. And they will then have 347 stories a week about whoever is the candidate, all focused on how inexperienced and unprepared that person is.

David Roberts is even more blunt:

So, say Biden stepped aside in favor of Harris tomorrow. How long until the vapid gossips we call political reporters find something wrong with her, some alleged flaw they just have to write 192 stories about? How long until the hopped-up mediocrities we call pundits find some “counter-intuitive” reason that the new Dem ticket is flawed after all? How long until the irredentist left gets over the temporary thrill of its new Harris memes & remembers that she’s a cop & turns on her? How long before the ambient racism & misogyny in the US lead center-leftists to conclude that, sure, they’d support a black woman, just not *this* black woman? In other words: how long before everyone reverts to their comfortable, familiar identity & narratives? About 30 f’ing seconds, is my guess.

Is that take too pessimistic, too cynical? We may soon find out.