The Low-Bar Problem

YIKES: Watch Joe Biden incoherently babble at his Hollywood fundraiser as Obama looks on in SHOCK.

This is so bad…

pic.twitter.com/W7WsF74zvM

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) June 17, 2024

The conventional wisdom, even before the 2024 presidential debate dates were set, has been that Joe's handlers will be able to prep him well enough for the first debate, now a little over a week away, that he'll surpass a low-bar standard and "win" the debate against Trump simply by avoiding major embarrassments. For instance,

Biden’s performance at his State of the Union address — which went over largely well and led to many public reconsiderations of whether he was too diminished to run for a second term — is very much on the minds of some Trump aides. They expect that Biden’s team will get him into similar shape ahead of the debate.

As of now, even though I'm a contrarian in any case, I have serious doubts about this. The CNN story at the link was written last month, and it uses the history of both Biden's and Trump's past debate preps to try to predict the future. The piece continues,

People who have been in previous debate preps sessions with [Biden] said they can be exhausting and, for long stretches, not productive. He prefers sitting around a table covered in policy binders, trying to explain himself in long answers in ways that he feels like he hasn’t gotten to do and asking whoever he can make eye contact with, “How would you do it?”

Much of the work goes into focusing him, these people who have been in prep with him said, pulling him back to the key point or narrative that aides have identified.

And that was Joe in 2020. There seems to be a consensus that he's not like that in 2024, he has good days and bad; he checks in, and he checks out.

But multiple prominent Democrats said they worry Biden can’t come off as robust next to Trump. They live a daily nightmare imagining some kind of trip up, literal or verbal, that becomes the one Biden can’t come back from, and they think the debate stage seems like the obvious place where this could happen.

On the other hand, there's an expectation in some quarters that Trump won't be able to control himself. Here's a think piece at Real Clear Politics yesterday:

Every question from pro-Democrat moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash and every taunting response from President Biden about threats to democracy will be an opportunity for Trump to lose his temper or to alienate moderate voters with intemperate replies.

. . . Remember, this debate and another one in early September were proposed by Biden at a time when he was trending badly behind Trump in the polls, especially in battleground states. Presumably, the Biden campaign believed the early debates would shore up his support and hurdle him over the much indicted, and now convicted, former president.

Is this guy trying to imply that something has changed since then, that Joe's doing much better in the polls? If anything, the polls in the artificially designated "battleground" states have remained the same, while Trump is starting to pull ahead in other states like Minnesota and Virginia. It's also starting to look like Biden's staff had expected his trips to Europe for the D-Day commemoration and G7 would make him look presidential going into the debate, when the visuals turned out to be disastrous. But the guy continues,

If Trump remembers to act presidential, and not like an attack dog, there is every reason to believe he will attract voters eager for a change.

This repeats the idea that Trump is basically out of control, a perpetual adolescent who's his own worst enemy. This isn't the Trump we're seeing. He's been pretty clearly following the advice of his counsel, although some part of his legal strategy is also what Alan Dershowitz has recognized is the Chicago Seven defense, deliberately baiting some of the judges and prosecutors into making errors -- and in fact, this has been remarkably effective over the past year. As his indictments have mounted up and verdicts have gone against him, he's just risen in the polls.

This isn't someone who's out of control. He's also very good ex tempore, and he has a standup comic's sense of timing -- but that leaves aside that he simply has a sense of humor, which Biden completely lacks.

Still, even this omits the new inflection of the campaign. The line up to now has been that Biden's "age" is a major campaign issue. But that's putting it politely. The visuals from G7 and the Hollywood fundraiser raise an entirely different question, to which Piers Morgan gave voice yesterday:

I watched the viral clip of Barack Obama taking a frozen Joe Biden by the arm and leading him off stage at their star-studded $30 million LA fundraiser, and posted on X what I suspect everyone who watched it was thinking: “So embarrassing. The Democrats can’t let this go on, surely?”

Within a few hours, a staggering 7.5 million people had viewed my post and many thousands of those had liked, reposted or commented on it.

As I thought, the vast majority shared my honestly held opinion that President Biden is no longer fit for the highest office in America.

The question really is no longer, "Will Joe be able to make it through another four years?" That's been overtaken by events. The question has become, "He really shouldn't be president now, should he?" This has an urgency that in some ways overrides the election. It's an issue that he likely can't be removed from office before next January, and he almost certainly will lose the November election. What can we do to feel comfortable in the meantime?

Piers Morgan continues with the real question:

Biden is supposed to be America’s commander-in-chief but, at what is a very dangerous time for the world, I wouldn’t trust him now to order a restaurant meal let alone a military strike.

So why is he still running?

What I've been seeing, especially since the G7, is that Biden is capable of losing situational awareness at any time and either behaving completely inappropriately, as he did with the Pope Francis headbump, or simply freezing. That suggests to me that as of now, even more than in 2020, any attempt at debate prep is likely to be a futile endeavor. But there's also now absolutely no assurance that he won't simply lose situational awareness during the debate itself. That, of course, raises questions beyond just the debate.

I don't think the low bar scenario is remotely applicable as things now stand. I've been saying for a while that events are going to move more rapidly than people think.