Good Enough?

I didn't watch Joe's big boy press conference last night, but I did check the aggregators later to see if there'd been any major blunders. My sense of things was that, although he'd started out by misgendering Vice Preasident Trump, his performance was good enough:

The Democrat Party is left in limbo as President Joe Biden’s NATO press conference avoided total disaster despite several gaffes, and it could stave off internal efforts among Democrats to remove him as the nominee in the immediate future.

. . . Biden’s former White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said on MSNBC that she thinks the press conference “gave [Biden’s campaign] more time, which for the campaign is a win.”

Nevertheless, the consensus that seems to be emerging is more aligned with Susan Glasser in the New Yorker:

And sure enough, Biden was barely into his first response before he let loose another gaffe, arguably even cringier than the first. Asked about Vice-President Kamala Harris and her ability to step in for him if need be, Biden responded by saying, “Look, I wouldn’t have picked Vice-President Trump to be Vice-President if I think she was not qualified to be President.” This time, he did not even spot the error.

. . . But, for those who listened to the full hour of Biden’s press conference, it wasn’t, in the end, the gaffe that made this a poor performance. It was Biden’s over-all halting, painful delivery. It was his struggle to find words, and the fact that when he did find them they were often not the right ones. Most important, it was his inability to make the case for himself—and his difficulty prosecuting the case against Trump.

Mark Leibovitch wrote this in The Atlantic before the press conference:

Never underestimate the destructive power of a stubborn old narcissist with something to prove.

Ideally no one gets hurt along the way: Maybe grandpop refuses to give up his license, drives into an oak tree, and only the car gets totaled. But sometimes there are casualties[.]

. . . President Joe Biden, 81, is acting like one of history’s most negligent and pigheaded leaders at a crucial moment, and right now, we are all pedestrians.

Since his debate debacle nearly two weeks ago, much of America has been locked into the classic “Will he or won’t he?” cliffhanger. Will Biden step aside and not run for reelection, as massive majorities of voters have for years said they want him to do? Or will he persist in pursuing one of the most ill-fated and ill-advised presidential campaigns ever carried out?

. . . As of now, it looks as if Biden is committed to “riding this out” and “staying the course,” no matter how unfit he might be for the ugly course ahead. This is, maddeningly, the only consideration that now matters, because Biden is the ultimate decision maker.

According to Axios,

Democrats who were bracing for the worst out of President Biden's press conference at the NATO summit instead saw a passable performance – but it doesn't appear to have calmed Capitol Hill's panic around his candidacy.

. . . One senior House Democrat, asked it the press conference would quiet the uproar on Capitol Hill, told Axios "probably not," while another said "not quite, but almost."

Said another House Democrat: "Tonight he looked better than the debate, but still not enough to recover and beat Donald Trump."

So for now, the emerging situation seems to be that Trump is at minimum expected to do much better than he did in either 2016 or 2020, while the main obstacle for Democrats is Joe Biden himself. The party is consumed by controversy over whether to replace him as a candidate, but even if it were to agree to do this, there's no concrete plan of action, and other than Kamala Harris, there's no clear substitute. Nor is there any assurance that Harris would do any better against Trump.

Meanwhile, the longer the uncertainty drags out, the less time is available for a replacement Democrat candidate to unify the party or organize a campaign operation, and the less pressure is on Trump to do strenuous campaigning while the Democrats self-immolate in full view.

Right now, I still think the closest parallel to this year's campaign is 1972, except that the foreordained loser this year is the incumbent, not the challenger. It doesn't mean as much if the challenger has no credibility, as McGovern didn't have, and the Democrats were able to disavow him as a representative Democrat in the wake of his loss, while they soon enough recovered their credibility by shifting the focus to Nixon with Watergate.

The problem for 2024 is that Biden is the incumbent Democrat unifier and elder statesman.