I was wrong about Biden

The worst feeling in the world

I really don’t enjoy being wrong.¹ But looking back on Biden’s disastrous debate with the benefit of some time away, I have to admit that I was wrong.

I was, of course, aware that Joe Biden was old and showed signs of aging. I was aware that the need to manage his energy level meant maintaining a more limited roster of public events than a typical president, to say nothing of a president running for reelection. And I was aware that, in principle, replacing an unpopular incumbent on the ticket could be a good idea.

But I was also aware that a large share of the video “evidence” of Biden’s incapacity was flagrantly clipped or cropped to give a dishonest impression. I was also aware that both Republicans and leftists had been insisting that Biden’s brain was cooked since 2019 and that he’d accomplished an awful lot — winning the primary and the general election, passing two big partisan bills plus two big bipartisan ones plus several smaller deals, adding Finland and Sweden to NATO — for a guy who was allegedly incapable of doing the job. I knew that I had talked to President Biden,² and that the conversation gave me no doubts about his capabilities. I also knew that I’d spoken to a lot of mid-level Biden administration officials who (like everyone) had various complaints and frustrations, none of which ever amounted to “the president is too old.” When Ezra Klein wrote his original open convention column in February, I took all of his points, but thought it was premature. Biden didn’t need to drop out, I thought, he needed to get in the race and impress people. The State of the Union quieted some doubters. Ezra didn’t recant, but he conceded that if SOTU Biden started appearing regularly, then Democrats might be out of the woods. I thought that would happen.

But between the March 7th State of the Union and the June 27th presidential debate, I misread the situation.

I thought I saw Biden upping the pace of his public events, doing rallies, fundraisers, and interviews. I saw Republicans seeming to backtrack as Debate Night approached, increasingly making jokes about the need to subject Biden to drug testing because they were aware he was going to put on a decent performance. The Biden campaign itself had a pretty good gag going the day of the debate about selling cans of “performance enhancing” water as merch. My expectations were in line with the campaign’s expectations: I thought Biden would clear the low bar that had been set for him by Republicans and take advantage of one of the few big opportunities to erase Trump’s advantage.

Clearly, that’s not what happened.

The campaign itself is now characterizing it as “a bad debate,” which it was. But they’re missing that the bad debate calls into question the entire interpretation of the previous months’ events offered by Biden’s side — by my side. I was wrong, and I feel awful for having been wrong. I take my job seriously and try to provide accurate information and insights on the issues I cover. I’ve felt sick to my stomach since the debate, and I get why key decision-makers don’t want to admit they were also wrong. It’s a lot more fun to feel embattled than embarrassed by your own errors.

And yet, here we are.

Four months of misinterpretation

What makes this all so hard is that a lot of the relevant facts here are like the rabbit-duck illusion. There were tons of data points that, if you looked at them the way the majority of the public was looking at them even before the debate, point to the idea that Biden is too old. Most people have been seeing the duck all along. But I was seeing the rabbit.

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.

Biden isn’t doing press conferences. He’s using teleprompters at fundraisers. The joint appearances with Bill Clinton or Barack Obama look like efforts to keep attention off the candidate. It’s not just that he’s avoiding hostile interviews or refusing to sit with the New York Times, he isn’t even doing friendly-but-substantive shows with journalists like Ezra Klein or Chris Hayes. It was a while ago now that I talked to him, and though it went well, I haven’t heard recent rumors of many other off-the-record columnist chats. The seemingly inexplicable decision to skip the Super Bowl interview is perfectly explicable once you see the duck. In a re-election year, a president needs to do two different full-time jobs simultaneously, and Biden was really struggling with that. Apparently foreign governments were sitting on some anecdotes that have now leaked, which I wouldn’t have thought possible.

But the biggest data point that I blew off was a recent and totally unambiguous one.

Five days before the debate, someone who’d seen Biden recently at a fundraiser told me that he looked and sounded dramatically worse than the previous times they’d seen him — as recently as six months ago — and that they were now convinced Biden wouldn’t be able to make it through a second term. I blew that warning off and assumed things would be fine at the debate.

Now that Biden apologists like me are discredited in the eyes of the public, most people will probably just decide he’s been unfit this whole time. Per my fundraiser source, and people I know who were deeply involved in IRA work, I don’t think that’s true. My guess is that the rigors of the campaign schedule combined with the linear progression of time and the trauma of Hunter’s legal problems made things much worse. But nobody’s going to care or believe anything this White House says.

The media climate is going to get worse

One take I’ve heard is that the political hit to Biden won’t be that bad because most people already thought he was too old and it’s “priced in.” I’ve heard that I’m overreacting personally because I didn’t think that and now feel bad about the situation.

And perhaps there’s something to that. A point I make frequently is that everyone should aim to be more rational and less emotional in their politics. I feel, personally, hurt and embarrassed about how this played out. I think Biden made me look foolish, and I don’t like it. But it is true that most people were not fooled and will not necessarily react in the same way.

That said, I don’t think Democratic Party elected officials have yet totally grokked what it’s going to be like to wage a campaign without cover. A post-debate Alex Thompson story suggested there are “two Bidens,” one from 10am to 4pm who does fine, but that “outside of that time range or while traveling abroad, Biden is more likely to have verbal miscues and become fatigued, aides told Axios.” If that story had come out two weeks ago, I would have made fun of it. Biden gets tired at night and suffers from jet lag? I mean, yes, he is a human being. I was just in Portugal for a week, and I also have a tendency to “become fatigued” when I engage in international travel. Being president is a 24/7 job in principle, but all presidents need to sleep and eat and are impacted by travel. When I first came to town, I was scandalized by the rumors of off-label prescription drug use on Air Force Force One during George W. Bush’s presidency, but it turns out every administration is like that — not just for POTUS but for senior staff as well — because it’s the only way to do the job.

But after what we saw on debate night, I can’t dismiss what Thompson is saying.

Before the debate, I thought the “Biden is too old” crowd was making the classic conspiracy theorist error of assuming a secret could be kept. After the debate, the leaks started coming from both inside the White House and from foreign governments. This stuff is always basically impossible to prove since it’s so second-hand. But once you’re in duck mode, how do you get out? How do you dismiss it all?

Similarly, Biden’s strong performances at his occasional campaign rallies would make great supporting infrastructure for a re-election campaign if he’d turned in a strong debate performance. If you’re seeing the rabbit, it’s just more evidence that you’re looking at a rabbit. But once you see the duck, anything he does with a teleprompter is just more evidence that you’re looking at a duck. Precisely because Biden can do good speeches using the prompter, it seems like the problem in the debate was not simply verbal disfluency but an age-related reduction in fluid intelligence — the speed with which the mind can process what the other person says and think up a riposte.

What comes next?

One thing that I do think I was right about is that the chorus of pundits, myself included, who suddenly rose up to say “Ezra was right, Democrats need a new nominee” had basically no efficacy. People love to get mad about articles, but the Democratic Party is not, in fact, run by a cabal of center-left columnists.

More to the point, the Democratic Party is quite literally not run by anyone.

Every time I read a take that expresses bafflement over how “The Democrats” could have put themselves in this situation, I get mad all over again. If you call “the Democrats,” nobody picks up the phone. The reason no major political figure ran against Biden in the primaries is that major political figures are adults with polling operations and those operations told them they would lose. Dean Philips did, in fact, run against Biden, and it’s not just that he lost, he never even put up “surprisingly good” numbers that would tempt someone else into the race. Don’t forget that in the 2016 cycle, Bernie Sanders was not the major political figure he is today. It’s not that Hillary Clinton’s nomination was contested by a powerful left-wing faction, left-wing factional power was built because Sanders’ campaign identified and exploited her weak standing.

Columnists calling on Biden to step down provide, in my view, are a small boost to Trump’s election odds and a minuscule increase in the odds that Biden actually steps aside. I think we have to say it anyway, because this is journalism and we owe a duty of truth to our audience. But in narrow cost-benefit terms, the public criticism of Biden has negative expected value.

Elected officials have a different set of responsibilities. I’ve seen some people express frustration that Barack Obama came out with such a strong statement of support for Biden. But Obama slagging Biden in public would have been a boon to Trump and accomplished nothing. Same for Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries and Nancy Pelosi and everyone else who matters. These are politicians, and they do not share journalists’ obligations of candor.

But what they do in private does matter, and I hope they do the right thing.

As far as I can tell, Biden is currently taking counsel primarily from his family. That is, on its own terms, a bad sign. Biden’s narrative about the 2016 and 2020 primaries is that he was dismissed by the cognoscenti (including, critically, Obama in 2016) and nobody believed in him but himself and his inner circle. There is some truth to this, and it’s why he won’t care what pundits say. But crucially, front-line Democratic Party elected officials believed in him in 2020. Donors thought Mayor Pete was the best electability choice and quants thought Amy Klobuchar was the best electability choice, but swing seat Democrats liked Biden more. The people Biden should be meeting with are Tammy Baldwin and Bob Casey and Ruben Gallego and Jared Golden and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and others with skin in the game.

In February, I think the right thing for those people to tell him (in private) would have been that he needed to get out there and run a real campaign, that if he wasn’t up for that then he should step aside, but that swing state Dems would be much better off with him at the top of the ticket than with Kamala Harris or with the downside risks of an open convention. Today, I think it’s clear that Biden cannot run a real campaign, so the message needs to change. It’s still better as a private message than a public one, but it’s not clear to me that the president is even having private conversations with the people he needs to be talking to.

What about Trump?

The stupidest response to all this that I’ve read is the people asking why nobody is calling on Trump to drop out.

Look, major GOP donors did actually invest real money in trying to make Ron DeSantis or Tim Scott or Nikki Haley the nominee instead. That Trump is a badly flawed, deeply unpopular candidate is hardly a new idea. I do think that Trump has one upside for the GOP relative to Scott or DeSantis, namely that he has been willing to distance himself more from the anti-abortion movement. But if Nikki Haley were the nominee, she’d be crushing Biden right now and I think that’s kind of obvious. Am I going to write “Trump should step aside so the GOP can nominate Nikki Haley and crush Biden” as a take? Of course not. Because I’m a Democrat, and while I hate Trump, I also don’t want Haley to crush the Democrats.

If Trump had just retired quietly after January 6, 2021, I’d have breathed a huge sigh of relief for the future of American democracy.

But I’d still be a Democrat who cares about the interests of poor people and a woman’s right to choose and who thinks it’s a bad idea to enact budget-busting tax cuts for the rich. Indeed, I am still a Democrat today and I’ll vote for Biden over Trump any day of the week. Trump is a criminal and an insurrectionist, but I also just don’t agree with Republicans’ policy ideas. What I would like is for the Democrats to beat Trump.

This piece is already long, so I’ll write more about what I think Democrats’ options actually are in future pieces. For now, though, I’ll just say that I think the case for Biden over Trump remains strong, but the only people who are going to buy it are people who are comfortable with the idea of Kamala Harris taking over. Which just means that at this point, Harris would be a stronger nominee than Biden. The interesting question is whether there are even stronger options and how we would know. But people who are able to communicate with the president, with the president’s family, or with his inner circle of advisors should tell them clearly that the best way for the president to preserve his legacy as The Man Who Beat Trump is to let someone else do it in November.

1. “So how come you’re wrong so much hahahah?” Yes, I get it.

2. Unfortunately, I cannot say more about this due to the terms of the conversation.