Big Moments
The most anticipated press conference in recent political history took place Thursday night at the NATO summit in Washington.
As a growing number of Democrats have called on Biden to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race or questioned whether he can continue, Biden sought to assuage the concerns of his party and the country. And all political eyes were on him.
Here is my brief assessment:
1. Strong but faltering: Democrats’ struggles continue
Following Biden’s widely panned performance at the debate two weeks ago, revelations that the White House had staged a local radio interview and uneven interviews with ABC News and MSNBC, Biden set a low bar for himself.
He managed to ease some fears by fielding questions mostly accurately over the course of nearly an hour on Thursday, but it was still a low bar to clear.
The least memorable moments were:
- Biden worked himself to his own detriment by mistakenly calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “President Putin” just before the press conference and by referring to Vice President Harris as “President Trump” early in the question-and-answer session.
- On a smaller scale, he briefly mentioned he was being advised by “my commander in chief,” before amending it to say “the chief of staff of the military.”
- “We created 2,000 jobs last week alone,” he said, an apparent reference to a recent jobs report that showed more than 200,000 jobs were added this month. June.
- In response to a question about the head of the United Auto Workers union questioning Biden’s ability to win, Biden retorted, “The UAW just endorsed me. Go ahead.” (The UAW endorsement came more than five months ago. It’s unclear whether Biden was referring to another labor organization, the AFL-CIO, which reiterated its support for Biden this week.)
There were small gaffes, to be sure, but they were many and suggest that moments like those in the debate are far from a thing of the past.
It’s entirely possible that this performance will leave the Democratic Party in purgatory, emboldening Biden to carry on but leaving concerns lingering. (Some Democrats have since called on him to step down.) We’ll know the results in the coming hours and days.
2. Press conferences play to his strengths, and he mostly holds them at home.
This was good preparation for Biden because much of the agenda was about foreign policy, something he knows well, whatever his flaws may be, as a former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and as a president.
Case in point: midway through a press conference, he spent about 15 minutes answering two foreign policy questions (with some follow-ups) and going into quite a bit of detail, before veering off into topics unrelated to the questions, apparently wanting to make a show of something.
3. He basically admitted that things were not going well politically.
Biden claimed on Friday that he’d been told the race was “50-50.” His assessment on Thursday night seemed more sober.
He previously noted that five sitting presidents have had lower approval ratings than he does at this point — relatively low approval ratings.
At another point, he suggested the numbers in Israel were better than at home, but then appeared to regain his composure, adding: “Better than a lot of other people here.”
4. He gave an eyebrow-raising response to “what’s changed”
There’s also been some debate about whether running for a second term was ever the plan all along — after all, Biden was set to become the oldest president in history in 2020, and he had said he would be a “bridge” to a younger generation of Democratic leaders. When asked about that statement, he seemed to acknowledge he’d changed his mind.
“What has changed is the gravity of the situation I inherited in terms of the economy, foreign policy and division at home,” Biden said.
Biden added, somewhat uncertainly, “If we find ourselves in a situation tomorrow where we’re in line and I’m not … taking over what I did and just moving forward with things, one way or another, things would be different.”
Some debate is expected about the answer.
5. Another answer that fails to calm Democratic nerves
Biden, in an interview with ABC on Friday, cut many Democrats’ hearts off when he said he’d be happy about the 2024 campaign even if Donald Trump won, “as long as we give it our all.” This isn’t what Democrats who see defeating Donald Trump as an existential issue wanted to hear. They want to win.
He gave a similar answer late Thursday night.
Asked if he would reconsider his campaign if the campaign told him Harris had the advantage, Biden said he would not.
“No,” Biden said, “unless they come back and say, ‘You have no chance of winning.'”
Biden added in a clear whisper: “Nobody’s saying that. The polls don’t say that.”
The answer is simple: Biden believes he is in the best position to win, but he has not agreed to that, instead suggesting he would continue to run even if the odds were against him and other candidates had a better chance.
Another moment you may have missed
The new Washington Post/Ipsos poll, released Thursday, is the latest to examine how the electoral landscape has changed since the debate two weeks ago.
The good news for Biden is that, compared with other polls, it shows the race nationally remains close (46 percent to 46 percent). The bad news is, pretty much everything.
- Fifty-six percent of Democrats say Biden should be replaced, slightly more than in previous polls, even as Biden claimed on Monday that “the average Democrat still wants me to be the nominee.”
- More than eight in 10 registered voters currently agree that Biden is too old, one of the highest figures ever.
- In April, 23% of voters said Biden had better “mental acuity” than Trump; now that number is down to just 14%. Only 32% of Democrats say Biden has an advantage.
- Thirty-six percent of Democrats and 48% of independents said the debates made them view Biden more favorably — in both cases far more than the percentage of people who said the debates made them view him more favorably.
Other polls have Biden’s approval rating down about 2 points on average, and several quality polls have him down 6 points nationally, and even the “good” polls are now pretty bad.
A turning point in history
Biden is keen for Democrats to follow the party’s incumbent president.
But there was a time long ago when a senator was so concerned about the party’s decline because of a sitting president that he rebelled. That senator was Joe Biden.
Annie Linskey wrote this prescient piece in The Wall Street Journal last December: Essentially, Biden was worried about Jimmy Carter’s 1980 prospects and so he polled his Democratic colleagues about the prospects for an open convention.
Biden supported Carter in 1976, but by mid-1979 had refrained from endorsing him, saying the party needed a winner and “I don’t know at this point whether that’s Jimmy Carter.” He ultimately endorsed Carter.
Annie’s writing is worth reading.
