Joe Biden Might be the Best One-Term President of All Time, but is That Enough?
Joe Biden Might be the Best One-Term President of All Time, but is That Enough?
A look at the Democratic Party's next steps.
Happy Friday Saturday* to all my beautiful babies. I have given this Jackal a lot of thought, so hopefully that means all of those thoughts come together quickly on the page. No promises.
*I was going to just send this out on Friday morning, but I did not watch the press conference in real time last night,1 so I watched all of it yesterday to give you an honest take.
Before I get into what this post will be about (potentially replacing Joe Biden), I want to give some attention to Donald Trump. The Press is mightily focused on President Biden lately (more than fair!) which has allowed some of Trump’s absolute insanity to slip under the radar. Over the past two weeks since the debate Trump has:
…said that Liz Cheney should have a televised military tribunal for betraying him.
…said he will build internment camps to hold the 11 million people he plans to deport. Pro-tip: Do not promise to put people in camps.
…said that Congo and Africa were releasing people from their prisons to come to the United States.
…said this at a rally:
Mothers will never again be forced to watch their children overdosing in hosplee…and we will never allow mothers to watch their child hopelessly dying in their arms, screaming, ‘What can I do, what can I do? Help me God, what can I do?’ We are a nation whose once revered airports are a dirty, crowded mess....You sit and wait for hours and then are notified that the plane won’t leave, that they have no idea when they will. Where ticket prices have tripled. They don’t have the pilots to fly the planes, they don’t seek qualified air traffic controllers, and they just don’t know what the hell they are doing.”
…and had a Mitch McConnell-like freeze-up at the same rally. Yes, he is old too.2
We are going to talk about Joe Biden for the rest of the Jackal, but I’m including the above so I do not get emails about how I should be writing about Trump. Yes, he’s unfit to be the President and is an inherent threat to America. His brain also appears to be pretty bad and he also might be a sociopath, narcissist, and psychopath all wrapped in one. I get it. But it’s time to have a talk about Uncle Joe.
Is Joe Biden’s brain that bad?
After the debate, I posed an open question, which was: “Would Joe Biden be forced off the ticket in November?” I said that my gut told me no, but that it was something that should be discussed. I linked to a Tim Miller piece, and continuing with that spirit, I’ll link to this discussion between Miller and Ezra Klein, which is super engaging.
To summarize it, Klein basically says that the Democrats would be better off if they replaced Biden with Kamala Harris, or did some sort of open convention to select another candidate. Back in February, Klein wrote a piece arguing that the Democrats should choose someone else and that it would be good for the Party to have an open debate about who their candidate should be, since it shouldn’t be Joe Biden. After Biden’s State of the Union, Klein walked it back and said maybe he got it wrong and that Biden can make a forceful run for reëlection.
But going back to Klein’s piece, he does say that the evidence of Biden’s decline has become more pronounced this year and that should push Democrats into replacing him. Overall, his argument is essentially the same as it was before: If the American public simply thinks that 81 is an age that is too old to be president, then you eventually have to listen to them and pick someone younger. And the Democrats have the means and options to do so, right now or at the convention next month.
Miller and Klein had their conversation before Biden’s press conference on Thursday night, which was generally well-received. He had a few gaffes (he called Trump his Vice-President, which would have been accurate in 1803, when Joe Biden was born), but overall his command of the issues was really good. He went into great detail about NATO and foreign policy, and gave answers to complicated questions that you could not imagine Donald Trump giving in a million years.
It definitely showed that Biden does not have severe cognitive issues or dementia; if you can field questions about complicated foreign policy issues your cognition is functioning pretty well.3 At one point during the press conference, he went back and forth with a New York Times reporter about foreign policy, which made me audibly say, “Damn.” The question is: Is this Joe Biden all the time, and will it be Joe Biden for four years? The answer to that is way more complicated.
I know what’s coming. Just make it quick and painless.
The reporting over the past few weeks has been alarming. Over the past few months, people close(r) to Biden have said they’ve noticed a decline. George Clooney himself said that Biden at a fundraiser seemed markedly more deteriorated from Biden in 2020.4 What stood out to me: Ian Bremmer said that some foreign leaders had told him that Biden’s decline was becoming more and more evident.
I want to go back to a piece I wrote a few months ago, where I discussed a point made by Megan McArdle. I acknowledged a point made by her, which was that at Joe Biden’s age, your cognitive functioning can change on a dime. She relayed a moving personal story, where she talked about how her mother was doing a Saturday crossword one week and then a month later she died. It is heartbreaking, so sad, and - I think this is overlooked because McArdle is a media person - a hard thing to share on the Internet.
I ultimately said that I think McArdle overestimated the decline Biden (or Trump) would face because they are both rich, and rich people do not experience normal aging the way us regular folks do. I think it is clear that I was too dismissive of her point (at best), or just flat-out wrong (at worst, and probably where I’d fall).
Sure, Joe Biden can answer detailed questions about foreign policy right now with pretty stunning alacrity for an 81 year-old. Can he continue to do that a year from now? Hell, can he do that five months from now? If you are saying “Yes” to those questions, you are way too partisan to be reading the Jackal, or you are a doctor. I personally don’t know if he can do those things tomorrow. The debate (THAT WAS ONLY TWO WEEKS AGO OMG) is perfect proof of this.
I think it’s fair to ask if the Biden White House and Campaign hid all of this from us. Matt Yglesias had a really good piece wrestling with this topic, where he openly says he was wrong about Biden. It is worth reading in full, but he basically says that he misread Biden’s decline because the White House and Biden’s Campaign showed all of us a rabbit, when the rest of the public was seeing a duck:
Yglesias explains:
What does the rabbit look like? It looked like a president who delivered a strong State of the Union. And sat for a long interview with Howard Stern. And did an hour on the SmartLess podcast. Biden has been zipping around the world for various foreign summits and meeting with world leaders. Does he maintain a lighter schedule than most presidents? Yes, but so did Donald Trump. Is he a bit more teleprompter-bound than I would have liked? Absolutely. But the State of the Union, again, leant credence to my rabbit view of this. Heckling from backbench Republicans forced him to go off script and while doing so he used the term “illegals.” That’s a no-no in contemporary progressive politics, but would be second nature to a 1990s Democrat like Biden.
My rabbit view of the whole situation was that Biden’s team was excessively worried about this kind of thing (rather than defend his choice of words, staff seemed to apologize for it and the president himself backed off that language). When a candidate speaks off the cuff frequently, they naturally wind up saying things that a speechwriter wouldn’t have written. In Biden’s case, this sometimes opened up a gap between his personal old guy instincts and contemporary progressive language politics. I thought the smart play would be to put Biden out there more, to “let Biden be Biden,” and to have the staff back up his authentic instincts rather than try to make him sound like a thirty-something Yale Law School graduate.
After the debate, though, I’m seeing the duck.
Maybe I’m seeing the duck too, but I have some qualms. Or maybe it’s more goose than duck (although both are equally delicious).
I do think some people in the Press are now seeing the duck, and are taking it personally. To wit, the New York Times wrote up a piece about how a Parkinson’s expert visited the White House eight times that was so poorly researched it resulted in a rival newspaper coming out and correcting them. Many people have described what’s happening now as a media “feeding frenzy,” where the Press gets a hold of a story and cannot let it go. I think that is partially true.
But some of Biden’s decline is holding on to me, to the point where I can’t wrestle it off of me. This is where I’m at:
Can Joe Biden do the job of the presidency right now?
Yes.
Can Joe Biden mount a vigorous campaign for reëlection?
Almost certainly not, and if he did, it would be less vigorous than needed.
Can Joe Biden serve another four years as president?
Probably not.
The last part is hard for me to get out, because I am not an expert on cognitive functioning or aging. I can get personal here: I have had two different family members deal with Alzheimer’s and dementia. I wrote maybe five or six different things here before ultimately deciding it was too upsetting to put down, but I can say I get a little offended when everyone, everywhere, openly and casually talks about another person having decreased cognitive functioning to the point where it becomes a punchline.
I will laugh at jokes about it next week and will probably make one myself, but it is wild to me that so many people feel comfortable writing about it or making predictions. I am probably the furthest thing you could be from a neurologist (our dog maybe takes the cake), so it just seems crazy to me to speculate.
So, I don’t know what will happen to Joe Biden, but I can tell you one thing for sure: Americans think he is too old to run for president again.
OK, but can he win?
I had this observation last week, but overall I think the perception of Biden being super old is something that is - at this point - almost impossible to overcome. Voters regularly say that Biden is too old, and whenever they hear him make a single mistake (the sort of mistake Trump makes a hundred times in one rally), it will immediately open up a discussion of his age.
Certain Democrats may not like it, but it is just reality. If Biden had truly crushed it at the debate, this probably wouldn’t be a huge part of the conversation, but it is inescapable now.
I know some Democrats are hesitant to talk about Biden being old or in cognitive decline to run again because it will mean that conservatives were right. They spent 5 years posting every meme and video of Biden being old and now they will be proven correct. I think that is a little too petty. For one, a broken clock is right twice a day. For another, being right now doesn’t mean you weren’t wrong before. I can’t find it, but Trevor Noah had a great little rant about COVID a couple years ago.
He basically says that the people saying all the negative stuff about COVID (it is fake, masks don’t work, the vaccines don’t work, etc.) have tried to take a victory lap and just continually stumbled over themselves. I think masks were the primary example, where we were told to wear them for several years before the Omicron variant basically rendered them useless. And that’s the thing: Being wrong for 3+ years about something does not mean you get to turn around and say you were right. If I guaranteed you that the Yankees would win the World Series for 10 years in a row and they lost every year but one, I’d still be wrong 90% of the time, which feels about right when you apply it to conservative media.
The media has spent years writing about Biden’s age, so it is not like it just magically appeared on the political landscape after the debate. It is simply not true that this was ignored or covered up by the media. McArdle points this out in her recent column.
Here’s the other thing: If they are actually right about Joe Biden having dementia from January 20, 2021, then they are inadvertently making a case for his reëlection: If he can run the country this well in his 80s, why can’t he continue to do it until he’s 86? These are true (i.e., not alternative) facts:
Inflation is down, to the point where a rate cut could be coming as early this month.
Crime is down to 50 year lows.
Border crossings are down!
Climate emissions are falling.
Inequality is falling at its fastest pace in decades.
Wages are growing.
There has been historic job growth.
The Dow Jones is at 40K.
My headline is not hyperbole: If this trend continues (which is always a big IF), Biden will go down in history as having the best single term in modern American history. If that’s truly the case, then why can’t he run for office again?
I am making this point only to say that if the conservative argument about Biden is 100% accurate, then the retort - that the Presidency is more than just the person who occupies the Office - is sufficient. But the President is more than just a president.
Then what happens next?
My general feeling right now is that the dam is breaking. Donor money is being held up, and we are getting close to two dozen House members that have openly said Biden should exit the race.
Maybe that will happen, or maybe Biden’s team will look at my points above and decide it is OK for them to stay in. One thing that did drive me crazy about Klein and Miller’s discussion is that Klein said the polls in 2022 were “historically accurate,” which is just fundamentally untrue. While the House results were close to the polling averages, the polls also showed:
Dr. Oz beating John Fetterman by 1% in Pennsylvania. Fetterman won by 5%.
Catherine Cortez Masto losing to Adam Laxalt. She won.
Herschel Walker beating Raphael Warnock. Warnock won by around 1%. Not a single poll in the week before the election showed Warnock winning.
Don Bolduc down to Maggie Hassan by only 2%. Hassan won by 15%.
The Cook Political Report said Republicans would win the Senate and would gain 20 to 35 seats in the House. Neither happened. Cook just moved a bunch of swing states in Trump’s favor.
Polls consistently showed that Hispanics were moving away from Democrats and towards Republicans. While that was true in Florida, it was not true in the rest of the country.5
So, Biden has an argument: The polls are wrong, people hate Donald Trump, and I have done a good job. What I think will matter more over the next few weeks is how many people who are close to Biden (the House minority leader, Democrats in the Senate, President Obama, etc.) all come out and say it is time for him to leave the race.
Once that happens, then I think it’s fair to say it’s over. Although Biden’s press conference performance may have extended his lifeline a little bit, the newsiest part of it to me was him expressing his openness to a new nominee. Maybe that’s where the winds are blowing.
See you all next week. I do have some sort of plan to write more about the immunity decision, but I keep getting so angry I have trouble getting it onto the page.
If you are super curious, my daughter was working her way through a poopy.
Again, try to take a moment and picture what would happen in the news media if Joe Biden had an episode like this.
I don’t want to go through every part of the press conference, but this interaction with NPR also saw Biden answering a question with extreme detail.
I am not linking to this piece because George Clooney’s opinion about politics means jack shit. If his wife had written it, that would be a different story.
This is detailed in this piece, but Fortune is paywalled and I feel bad for linking to it.