Over the weekend, several more mainstream (i.e., nonleftist) elected Democrats said that they are convinced or at least seriously concerned that President Joe Biden is not mentally fit to continue running for president. This is, to state the obvious, an extraordinary state of affairs for a party that as an institution prioritizes being a good soldier and falling in line. (For an example of this, look no further than the coordinated dropouts that helped Biden win the primary in 2020.)
In a Friday night interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, though, Biden presented himself as being confident, perhaps to the point of delusion, not just that he has the support of his party but that he is uniquely qualified to be president at this moment in history. Were his critics so shortsighted as to force him out of office, he implied with comments about NATO and the Russia-Ukraine war, the entire world might suffer.
What we have here are two trains set to collide, and with members of Congress returning to Washington this week after a recess, the collision is starting to take place. Biden opened fire by releasing a letter to congressional Democrats declaring his intention to stay in the race and appearing by phone on Morning Joe, a political talk show on MSNBC that features two married co-hosts who sit tightly together behind a desk and cluck in agreement about news topics for a few hours while drinking coffee. (I think that this is a strange thing to put on television, but some people like it, and admittedly I sent some emails to try and get on the show when my book was out.)
Biden’s counterattack makes a couple of things clear. The first is that, from a procedural perspective, he does hold the winning cards in this situation—we’re playing a card game aboard two speeding trains from which weapons are being fired, I guess; sorry. The other is that the questions about his fitness aren’t going to stop getting asked, because they are about his inability to reliably speak coherently in public. And the only way to address that problem is to speak coherently in public, something he can’t reliably do.
On the first subject, Biden’s letter emphasizes the idea that because he won the Democratic primary, taking him off the ticket would be an insult to the party rank and file. “The voters of the Democratic Party have voted. They have chosen me to be the nominee of the party,” it says. “Do we now just say this process didn’t matter?” This may be specious reasoning: Only about a third of registered Democrats voted in the race, a contest that was both essentially uncontested and held in its entirety before the debate in which Biden had trouble speaking. But it is a reminder that Democratic convention delegates, who select the person who will appear on ballots as the party’s nominee, are bound to vote for him under party bylaws.
That this letter is a written document is also a reminder of Biden’s difficulties communicating, which were evident even during his friendly telephone interview with Morning Joe. The president misspeaks or trails off, for instance, roughly five times in this 40-second clip, during which he’s reading from prepared material:
Meanwhile, in the New York Times, columnist Maureen Dowd highlights an exchange she had with a rather aggressive Biden campaign spokesperson. The spokeperson insisted that she change the following quotation, which appeared in her Saturday column—it’s what Biden said on ABC in response to a question about how he’d feel if he lost to Trump.
I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the goodest job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.
According to Biden’s campaign, the correct way to quote him about the possibility of losing the election is
I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the good as job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.
The president is fighting to save his political life. Is that going to get it done?