By Noah Rothman
Monday,
February 12, 2024
According to Politico’s Myah Ward, “top party
operatives” want to see Joe Biden get out there more. But to hear them describe
their expectations of the president, it’s like they’re talking about an
entirely different person. Clearly, they much prefer the Joe Biden who exists
in their memories to the one with which they are confronted today.
“They
want to see him engage with the press and voters in the off-script and punchy
exchanges he’s been known for in the past, which they believe will help chip
away at concerns about the president’s mental acuity,” the Politico piece
continues. “Democrats say that resolving fears about Biden’s age requires
getting him out in front of the country much more, even if there is risk
involved.” Indeed, there’s “hope” brewing “in certain circles” that Robert
Hur’s report alleging that the president would not be judged fit to stand trial
for mishandling classified documents by a jury “prompts a strategic change at
the White House and leads to a more visible, livelier version of Biden.”
“Circles”
is the right word to describe the klatches in which conversations like these
occur — a closed loop into which rationality cannot penetrate. All these
aspirations assume that the president’s somnolent demeanor, his forgetfulness,
and his incoherence are all choices that someone, somewhere, could unmake. If
Biden could still display the kind of elementary cogency and vigor he could
once deploy on demand, he would. Those days are behind us now. The best Biden’s
allies can hope for are fleeting moments of lucidity aided by a teleprompter
sufficient to convince voters that Biden’s problem isn’t as bad as they already
believe it to be.
Facing
up to the reality of Biden’s infirmity must not be a rewarding experience
because so many Democrats seem more inclined to indulge the delusion that the
former president could flip the script on his age if he only tried or were,
somehow, better coached.
“We
would recommend he and the First Lady do a 60 Minutes interview
to discuss it,” wrote Third Way executive vice president Matt Bennett. “That would allow him to go on the offensive
by ending his defensiveness.” Biden should hit the road, Democratic media
strategist Jarvis Stewart advised. “Show he’s not afraid to drill down and hear
the concerns of voters on the ground,” he insisted. “Biden should do interviews
that go deeper than a 15-minute press conference or drive-by gaggle can,” the
center-left columnist Bill Scher advised. “Show off foreign policy chops on
CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS or The Amanpour Hour for
the entire hour. Get into the economic weeds on NPR’s Planet Money.”
All
this might be good advice if it were directed toward an entirely different
president. Biden isn’t making a cantankerous spectacle of himself at impromptu
press conferences focused on his deteriorating mental state because that’s what
his White House thinks is the best use of the president’s time. Biden’s
advisers aren’t making fools of themselves by retailing increasingly ludicrous excuses for his conspicuous
absence from conventional presidential stages because that’s where they always
imagined their career paths would lead them. Everyone is making the best of a
bad situation here — one that is only going to get worse.
The
president’s allies are right to feel some sense of creeping embarrassment over
their association with this presidency, which is all that explains their
ill-advised public indulgence of a fantasy world in which a very different Joe
Biden occupied the Oval Office. But wishing away their unenviable circumstances
isn’t the most productive enterprise. Their only hope this fall is to get busy
framing the election as a referendum on Donald Trump’s boorish personality. The
harder they strain in the effort to erase Biden’s liabilities only highlights
them and reminds voters of why they’ve likely already concluded that Joe Biden is too
infirm to serve out another term in office.
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