At what point does political conviction curdle into something closer to denial? When I interviewed President Biden in January, I was struck most by the defiant confidence he had in himself: his dismissal of concerns about his age, his belief that he was “the one” to keep Donald Trump from regaining the Presidency, his rejection of warnings that he was behind in the polls. On Friday night, Biden sat down with George Stephanopoulos on ABC News. It was startling to hear the President make many of the same points again, as if the siege of the past eight days had barely registered.
Moments into the conversation with Stephanopoulos, it became clear that Biden had a limited desire to take away any lessons from his debate with Trump on June 27th, which pummelled the confidence of Democrats and stirred frantic talk of replacing him on the ballot. “Did you ever watch the debate afterward?” Stephanopoulos asked.
“I don’t think I did, no,” Biden said. It was a casually astonishing reply. In 2012, when President Barack Obama flopped in his first debate against Mitt Romney, Obama’s advisers arranged for him to sit through a tape of the spectacle, to grasp what his critics—and voters—had absorbed. This time, either Biden has not wanted to, or his advisers have not pressed him to.
Stephanopoulos wanted to know whether Biden understood, during the debate, how badly it was going, or, after, the impression it left on the Americans he had challenged to “Watch me” when judging his fitness for another four years in office. Biden replied by asking, in effect, for forgiveness: “After that debate, I did ten major events in a row, including until two in the morning.” He went on, “Large crowds, overwhelming response, no slipping. And so, I just had a bad night.” He chalked it up to exhaustion and a cold—a “bad episode” but not an indication of a “serious condition.”
Most of Biden’s responses in the interview were in that vein—a little meandering, demanding of recognition, presented far more lucidly than he had managed on the debate stage, but not with the kind of nimble, commanding presence that would silence the chorus of Democrats who want him to step aside. If it has come to be accepted that the eighty-one-year-old President of the United States has, in the language of the moment, good days and bad days, this was, in the strictest sense, a good day. In other words, as Michael Tomasky, the editor of The New Republic, put it in a comment on X, “That was the worst possible outcome: not anywhere near good enough to settle matters, but also not quite bad enough to be a slam-dunk that he has to go tomorrow.”
The interview was twenty-two minutes, surprisingly short for such a high-profile moment, when Biden and his advisers have been accused of hiding from the press, and he might have benefitted from showcasing more energy and stamina.