On the menu today: Joe Biden meets the press and hangs around for a while. It was bad by normal standards, pretty good by Joe Biden standards — but it may be moot, as apparently large numbers of congressional Democrats are ready to publicly call on Biden to end his reelection bid. Meanwhile, an eye-popping report from NBC News indicates that some of the people who are most eager to see Biden leave the presidential race are . . . employed by the Biden campaign. Read on.
Biden’s Underwhelming Press Conference
The lone silver lining to turning in the worst presidential debate performance in U.S. history is that it really lowers the bar for all subsequent appearances. So yes, by any measure, at his press conference Thursday night, Biden was “better than he was in the debate.”
The bad news for Joe Biden is that “pretty good by Joe Biden standards” is still pretty darn far from a normal “pretty good.” There’s a lot of space between debate-level calamity and actually good, and my colleagues uniformly graded Biden in the lower half of that vast range.
Only blood relatives or Biden’s personal staff who owe him their livelihoods will argue that, actually, Biden showed strength in his 50 minutes in front of the press. But it will be enough for any Democrat who wants to avert his eyes and hide in a hole rather than confront the fact that Biden’s campaign has already been mortally wounded for 14 days.
By any reasonable standard, that press conference was awful — halting, weak, and occasionally embarrassing and weird. By the new standard that’s been set, though, Biden did okay. He balanced the bad moments with a couple of long, well-informed, cogent answers on foreign policy. He wasn’t as bad as during the debate. So it’s a sort of win, or at least he didn’t blow himself out of the water. But none of this is normal or good for the country.
On the negative side of the measure, Biden was raspy and took a number of long pauses. He referred to Vice President Kamala Harris as Vice President Trump (on the heels of having mixed up Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin), claimed he was taking advice from the commander in chief, referred to a nonexistent broad federal rent-control program, and talked about how he had to do a better job of pacing himself. He mentioned how his staff had given him a list of reporters to call on and jabbed them for adding too many events to his schedule.
At the same time, he did field questions for an hour, in some cases giving long and detailed responses, which, even though riddled with errors (such as claiming Hamas had lost popularity in the West Bank), are something that his defenders can cite as evidence that he is still sharp enough to remain as the nominee.
If you’re a Democrat, you want clarity. You want Biden to either come out having swum with the pods from Cocoon, energetic and fired up, or to come out and turn in another disastrous performance that convinces the delegates that it’s time to pull the ejector seat. You don’t want something in between.
The best-case scenario for Trump is that Biden keeps limping along, poorly enough to dispirit Democrats and repel independents, but just well enough that the delegates aren’t willing to toss him. That’s likely what we got last night. As I wrote before the debate:
If you’re pulling for Trump, you don’t want Biden to go out there and prove himself to be so egregiously senile that he creates a consensus among Democrats that he must be replaced at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Trump has a straightforward message against Biden: “Had enough?” If the Democrats were to panic and somehow replace Biden (and Kamala Harris?) with Gavin Newsom or Amy Klobuchar or Cory Booker, the Democrats would be able to shed the burden of the past four years, like a snake shedding its skin, and pitch themselves as a party of change.
The polling numbers of Democratic Senate candidates suggest that Biden is a uniquely weak candidate — old, tired, widely perceived as ineffective and hapless. Trump fans should be pulling for Biden to be bad, but not quite so bad that Democrats unite around the desire to replace him.
A few other points: Biden said, “You know, we talk about, you know, money raised — we’re not doing bad.” Not true. Biden said, “There are at least five presidents who have run with lower numbers than I have now.” Yes, but 45 men have served in 46 presidencies. (They count Grover Cleveland twice.) Biden said, “For the next debate, I’m not going to be traveling 50 time zones a week before.” That is a wild exaggeration; Biden returned from his overseas trip to Europe twelve days before the debate.
But perhaps the most revealing Biden answer of the night was this:
Q: If your team came back and showed you data that she [Kamala Harris] would fare better against former president Donald Trump, would you reconsider your decision to stay in the race?
Biden: No, unless they came back and said, ‘there’s no way you can win.’ Me. (whispering) No one’s saying that. No poll says that.
Got that? Even if Kamala Harris has a better shot of beating Trump than he does, he’s not quitting. Charlie was always right about Biden.
Most importantly, it’s unlikely that anything Biden did last night is really going to dispel the images and sounds from his debate performance. In fact, it may be too late, if this report from CBS News is reliable:
Four Democratic sources with knowledge tell CBS News that they expect dozens of Democratic lawmakers over the next 48 hours to issue statements calling for President Biden to step out of the race.
The planning is coordinated, and some of the statements are pre-written, according to two sources. And it’s not clear that anything Mr. Biden says in his high-stakes press conference Thursday night could redirect the expected course of events.
House Democratic leadership has indicated to members that they should speak their minds, multiple sources told CBS News. One of those well-placed sources predicted that the next three to four days will be “brutal,” and that it may become untenable by sometime next week for the president to continue in the race.
If that really comes to pass, we are in surreal uncharted waters. Sure, back in 2016, lots of congressional Republicans were disgruntled and skeptical when Donald Trump was their nominee, but they mostly kept a low profile and skipped the convention in Cleveland.
Heck, forget congressional Democrats. It sounds like not even the people running the Biden campaign want to keep going, according to NBC News, in what may well rank among the top ten most bizarre political stories I’ve ever read:
Several of President Joe Biden’s closest allies, including three people who are directly involved in efforts to re-elect him, told NBC News they now see his chances of winning as zero — and the likelihood of him taking down fellow Democratic candidates growing.
“He needs to drop out,” one Biden campaign official said. “He will never recover from this. . . .”
The set of Democrats who think he should reconsider his decision to stay in the race has grown to include aides, operatives and officials tasked with guiding his campaign to victory. Those who spoke to NBC News said the sentiment that he should exit and leave the Democratic nomination to someone else — most likely Vice President Kamala Harris — is widespread even within the ranks of the campaign and the outside Democratic entities supporting it.
“No one involved in the effort thinks he has a path,” said a second person working to elect him.
I think I speak for many when I ask: “What the heck?” Judging from that article, some of the people who most passionately want Joe Biden to suspend his campaign get their paychecks from the Joe Biden campaign! You saw more grit and determination to win from the 1919 White Sox!
Folks, in many, many ways, I have enjoyed a blessed life. But I’ve known despair. I’ve known depression. I’ve known what it feels like when you have no hope, and you just can’t envision any way anything can get any better. After all, I’m a Jets fan.
But I have never found myself working in an endeavor that I hoped, for the good of the country, would fail. I mean, if you’re working on the Biden campaign, and you really think he’s endangering the country by remaining in the race, continuing a bid against Trump that is irrevocably doomed . . . why are you getting out of bed every morning? Why are you going to work?
Folks, no matter how bad your day is going, at least you don’t work for the Biden campaign! Joe Biden is making Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign look like a well-oiled machine. He’s making Michael Dukakis look like General Patton, and he’s making Walter Mondale look like a vote-winning dynamo.
Barack Obama famously warned, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** things up.” Well, I must admit . . . I underestimated Joe’s ability. I’ve never seen an incumbent president perform so badly that his own campaign staff believed he needed to drop out of the race.
Other than the answers, the most notable fact about last night’s presidential press conference is that it happened at all.
As of June 30, President Biden has participated in “fewer press conferences and media interviews than any of the last seven presidents at this point in their terms,” and it’s not close. Biden is at 164; the next-lowest was George W. Bush at 248.
Every president has bad press conferences, sooner or later. And every president bounces back from them, sooner or later. A bad press conference or interview very, very rarely defines a presidency.
This means the Biden team wasn’t worried about the president making a gaffe or saying something that was controversial or sounded stupid. They were worried about the president appearing as bad as he did on the debate stage — struggling to articulate a message, confused, doddering.
ADDENDUM: I’ll be on the Washington Post’s First Look program Friday morning.
Check out my offseason football talk on the Play Like a Jet podcast, with Scott Mason.