Biden Has Landed on His Justification for Staying in the Race
Hey, how was everyone’s Thursday night? Things didn’t go so well for President Joe Biden or the Democratic Party, something you can read about in Every News Article Published This Morning but also here and here. And with Democrats avoiding questions about whether Biden should be replaced on the ticket—or giving answers that kind of suggest he should without saying it— the president made a scheduled appearance (with first lady Jill Biden) in Raleigh, North Carolina, on Friday afternoon.
How’d it go? Well, with the eyes of the nation suddenly upon Raleigh, it was difficult not to notice that the very first speaker at the event—“North Carolina coordinated campaign regional organizing director” Harry Davis Jr.; watch out for that guy!—was a big improvement over Debate Biden in terms of energy level and coherence. So were the subsequent speakers, as well as rappers E-40 and Fat Joe, who gave what were, under the circumstances, very professional performances.
As for Biden himself: He didn’t trip over his words as much as he had on Thursday night. He ad-libbed some comments about North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper and bantered with his wife while speaking for 20 solid minutes; he repeated his 1950s-style debate description of Trump as having “the morals of an alley cat,” which evinced some sense of humor and self-awareness. And he all but explicitly addressed his debate brain freezes: “I don’t walk as easy as I used to. I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to,” he said. “But I know what I do know. I know how to tell the truth. I know right from wrong. And I know how to do this job, I know how to get things done. I know like millions of Americans know: When you get knocked down, you get back up.”
But he didn’t exactly give the impression that Thursday evening was an aberration from an enunciation standpoint, and it no doubt helped that he was reading off a teleprompter rather than speaking off the cuff. Standing behind the speaker who introduced him, Biden stared forward with the same slightly distressed, open-mouthed look that alarmed many debate viewers. He was energetic, shouting many of his lines, but what you might call his “face problem” persisted. His eyes were unfocused and lingered too long before moving—in the New Yorker, Vinson Cunningham called it “lost, misty mooniness”—as if he was having trouble figuring out what he’s supposed to think about next.
More to the point, Biden’s problem is not necessarily that he’s going to have a senior-moment gaffe at every campaign event from here on out, but that every campaign event from here on out will be watched closely to see if he does have one, and when he does, everyone will see it. Every halting step will be watched to see if it’s the one that precedes the collapse. And the best argument for his reelection, or at least the best honest one, is going to acknowledge his limitations. As California Rep. Ro Khanna put it Friday morning: “We have a great team of people that will help govern. That is what I’m going to continue to make the case for.”
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