Realism From Nate Silver

In a remarkably long and insightful essay, Nate Silver writes It's time for the White House to put up or shut up.

[E]ven the most optimistic Democrats, if you read between the lines, are really arguing that Democrats could win despite Biden and not because of him. Biden is probably a below-replacement-level candidate at this point because Americans have a lot of extremely rational concerns about the prospect of a Commander-in-Chief who would be 86 years old by the end of his second term. It is entirely reasonable to see this as disqualifying. The fact that Trump also has a number of disqualifying features is not a good reason to nominate Biden. It is a reason for Democrats to be the adults in the room and acknowledge that someone who can't sit through a Super Bowl interview isn't someone the public can trust to have the physical and mental stamina to handle an international crisis, terrorist attack or some other unforseen threat when he'll be in his mid-80s.

Biden has had two truly awful weeks, starting with the Hur report and his failed attempt to refute it by giving a focused press conference, followed by the Fani Willis sideshow that made it plain yet again that Biden's main reelection strategy, obtaining one or more criminal convictions for Trump before the election, is faltering. Silver has serious doubts Biden can turn this around.

A lot of commentators that I respect have pointed out that Biden ought to do more public events that would help to allay public doubts about his mental sharpness. The problem is, one can infer the reason that Biden is not doing them — namely that the White House comms team is rational and has inferred that the cost of doing them outweighs the benefits because Biden is too likely to come across poorly.

Let’s abstract this for a moment. Say that, in any given period of time — maybe over the course of a couple months — Biden has 20 opportunities to do what you might call Improvisational Public Appearances (IPAs). We can define these as events where Biden is not merely making pre-scripted remarks and instead faces sustained questioning from the media, voters or other public figures.

. . . It’s also why the press conference from two weeks ago was worrying. This was an IPA that Biden basically couldn’t avoid. You can’t respond to your own Justice Department’s claim that your memory is failing by not saying anything at all. And yet when forced to make this appearance, Biden’s performance was poor.

Silver offers this prescription if Biden does actually want to turn things around:

Over the course of the next several weeks, Biden should do four lengthy sitdown interviews with “non-friendly” sources. “Non-friendly” doesn't mean hostile: nonpartisan reporters with a track record of asking tough questions would work great. A complete recording of the interviews should be made public. The interviews ought to include a mix of different media (e.g. television and print) and journalistic perspectives.

. . . This really isn't too much to ask. These are the sorts of interviews that every other recent president has done. I admit that I'm asking Biden to pack in several in a row, but he has to make up for lost time. And the timing is urgent because he and his inner circle have to make sure that he's really up for a second term and that this is the best option for Democrats. If Biden was willing to take five hours to speak with Hur, he ought to to take five hours for this. And if he can't, it's awfully audacious to ask Americans to make him president for another four years.

Except that this is almost certainly too much to ask, and Silver basically knows this. He doesn't even mention the upcoming State of the Union speech; I suspect it will be hard for Joe to last an hour without stumbling, slurring, hypercorrecting, and misspeaking. It's hard to avoid thinking Joe is basically checked out and working a minimal schedule. He's being enabled and protected by his staff and, apparently, his wife:

Douglas Brinkley, author of “The Unfinished Presidency,” told CBS News’ “Face The Nation” on Sunday that Jill Biden has done the exact opposite of what other first ladies have done.

He noted that both former Presidents Harry Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson decided to leave office because their wives told them they didn’t want to serve a second term.

. . . “That’s not the case with Jill Biden. She likes power. She wants to stay. She wants some sense of revenge,” he continued. “She teaches in Virginia Community College. This milieu around our building here, this is her home. And the idea of relinquishing it all after you’ve taken the slings and arrows of the last years of attacks, and at the last minute, just when you get all the delegates you’re going to say, I’m going to open it up to a bunch of people — it’s very childish when you read those kind of reports.”

So the narrative is beginning to change. People like Nate Silver and Ezra Klein are saying Joe should step aside. Klein says,

This is the question Democrats keep wanting to answer, the question the Biden administration keeps pretending only to hear: Can Biden do the job of president? But that is not the question of the 2024 campaign. The insistence that Biden is capable of being president is being used to shut down discussion of whether he’s capable of running for president.

. . . We had to wait till this year — till now, really — to see Biden even begin to show what he’d be like on the campaign trail. And what I think we’re seeing is that he is not up for this. He is not the campaigner he was, even five years ago.

. . . That was why that news conference mattered. That news conference had a point. It had a purpose. The purpose was to reassure voters of Biden’s cognitive fitness, particularly his memory. And Biden couldn’t do that, not for one night, not for fewer than 15 minutes.

. . . So yes, I think Biden, as painful as this is, should find his way to stepping down as a hero. That the party should help him find his way to that, to being the thing he said he would be in 2020, the bridge to the next generation of Democrats.

Klein concludes that since it's too late for a primary campaign, the Democrats should work it all out at the convention, which is basically just a way of saying there's no Plan B, except that Plan A just isn't going to work.