If Biden Really Is Staying In the Race, One Pre-Taped Interview Isn’t Enough to Get Back on Track

President Joe Biden is scheduled to sit down with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos on Friday for a taped interview as he attempts to reverse the damage wrought by last week’s disastrous debate performance. It’s a start, but if Biden is in fact serious about staying in the race, it still falls far short from what will be needed to have a chance at remaining competitive with former President Donald Trump.

Biden has been facing increasing scrutiny since his verbal stumbles during last Thursday’s debate. Recent polling showed 72% of Americans do not believe he has the “mental and cognitive health to be president,” and on Tuesday, Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) became the first sitting Democrat in Congress to publicly call for him to withdraw from the race. Wednesday brought more tough headlines for the president, as rumors continued to swirl about internal discontent among Democrats and anxiety among campaign staff.

Nonetheless, Biden remains adamant that he intends to stay in the race.

The interview with Stephanopoulos will be taped Friday, with segments to be released starting that evening and then on other ABC programs over the next several days.

It is a safe assumption that Stephanopoulos will ask Biden about his debate performance and other worries about his age, and then the American people will be able to judge for themselves how honest and believable those answers are.

Of course, the interview will be viewed through a skeptical lens on the right, since Stephanopoulos was a longtime adviser for Democratic politicians, including serving as President Bill Clinton’s White House Communications Director. But right now the call is coming from inside the house, and Biden’s immediately pressing need is to stop his fellow Democrats from publicly turning on him.

The problem for the president is that no matter how pointed Stephanopoulos’ questions are, no matter how detailed and energetic Biden’s answers are, this interview will be a mere drop in the bucket against the floodwaters of concern about the mental fitness of our octogenarian president.

Politicians’ reputations are like words written in wet concrete; the longer and louder certain narratives are voiced to describe you, the concrete begins to harden, to the point where it would take a veritable jackhammer to disrupt the impression that has set in. And when you don’t work to define yourself, you concede space for your opponents and critics to scratch into the concrete for you.

And for Biden, the word “OLD” is scrawled across him in an irrevocably permanent fashion a nuclear bomb could not knock loose. There’s no logical way to argue a 81-year-old who would be 86 at the end of his second term if he were re-elected is not, in fact, old.

Biden’s so old he’s too old to be a baby boomer. So the question remains whether Biden also deserves labels like “feeble” or “senile.”

Similar age concerns exist for Trump, who is 78 and no stranger to his own unhinged and meandering commentary. What America saw at last week’s debate was convicted felon Trump unleashing a torrent of lies, but he spouted those lies with more energy and clarity than the pale and hoarse Biden, who in one especially painful moment declared “we finally beat Medicare.”

Those are the video clips that were replayed endlessly across television programs and everyone’s social media feeds. And thus far, the scant content Biden has provided to counter that has been limited to a handful of short speeches read from teleprompters, after which he took no questions.

He’s sent his press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre out several times to get raked over the coals by the White House Press Corps, but he hasn’t faced their questions himself.

Meanwhile, “too old to be president” and “mental decline” and other depressing phrases have continued to be etched into Biden’s rapidly-setting concrete. By the time the first clips from the chat with Stephanopoulos air, it will have been over a week since the debate catastrophe, with no effective defenses or counterpunches launched.

Regarding the question of Biden’s mental fitness, it doesn’t matter that Trump lies, supports bad policies, wants to overthrow the Constitution, and so on. As much as it pains me as an OG Never Trumper to write that, it simply is not a defense of Biden on this specific issue: is he competent to serve four more years as the President of the United States, or not?

Also not relevant: jet lag (Biden returned 12 days before the debate, and as National Review’s Jim Geraghty pointed out, blaming jet lag is either “grasping for excuses” or proof that “he can no longer perform his duties”); too much preparation/bad preparation for the debate (similar situation: it’s a lame excuse and the president’s job duties require him to process lots of high-level advice from advisers on a multitude of topics; it’s bad if he can’t figure out how to respond when Trump spews a fictional summary of Roe vs. Wade or lies about the events of January 6); what his staffers and congressional Democrats say he’s like in private (it is not the definitive proof the American people deserve), or speeches read from a teleprompter (ditto).

If Biden is serious about staying in the race, he needs to show his fellow Democrats he is up to battle Trump for the White House and show the American people that he is up to continuing to serve as the leader of the free world. Buying more TV ads, sending out Democratic heavy hitters and celebrity endorsers, or launching new campaign merch isn’t going to cut it.

Biden, and Biden alone, is the only person who can do this. Nothing anyone else says or does can provide this proof. He needs to be seen, on video, taking tough questions and giving sharp answers.

A good first step would be to schedule a briefing with the White House Press Corps as soon as possible — not with Jean-Pierre or another spokesperson but himself at the podium.

Biden should follow that up with a live interview with the CNN anchors who moderated the debate, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash. They had a front row seat to the debate and how the candidates were before and after, and they earned praise from across the partisan spectrum for conducting the evening fairly. Tapper in particular has been very vocal over the past few days in his skepticism of the excuses proffered by Biden’s team and criticism of the president for not coming forward to show his competency. Tapper and Bash will be tough but fair, and Biden would score desperately-needed points if he shows he can hold his own across the table from those two.

“Audentes fortuna iuvat” says the Latin proverb — fortune favors the bold — and if Biden really wants to save his campaign, he should consider sitting down for a similar live interview with one of the rational voices on Fox News. Bret Baier is generally viewed as reasonable and more objective than many of the network’s evening opinion hosts, and Dana Perino has likewise earned a credible reputation and has her own past White House experience as George W. Bush’s press secretary, giving her and Biden some common ground.

Back in April, I praised Biden for going on Howard Stern’s SiriusXM show as “exactly what the campaign should have been doing all along,” and urged him to schedule weekly interviews with a wide range of media outlets “to counter both voter ennui over a 2020 reboot and concerns about his age”:

Semafor’s Washington Bureau Chief Benjy Sarlin had an out-of-the-box idea for Biden: Hot Ones, the YouTube show where celebrities are interviewed while they consume increasingly spicy chicken wings.

I don’t know the president’s personal spice tolerance, but I once sat at a table at a dinner during the Texas Tribune Festival with Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), and she got nods of respect from the mostly native Texans at our table for being a good sport about trying some jalapeño-enhanced dish that was definitely spicier than her Minnesota palate normally encountered. It was a warm and relatable moment.

Go eat some chicken wings, Mr. President. Go on Brene Brown’s podcast. And we’d love to have you visit Mediaite’s Press Club. Just go have these conversations with the American people. November is coming.

That advice still stands, but Biden is now at a crisis level above what chicken wings can solve. The best thing he could do in the next 24 hours is to shock the White House Press Briefing Room by popping in and escorting Jean-Pierre away from the podium to take the mic himself, and then head over to CNN and Fox.

November is indeed coming, but if Biden wants his campaign to survive in any sort of viable shape after the holiday weekend, he has to take action now.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.