Opinion | This Isn’t All Joe Biden’s Fault

The argument Democrats have made is that Biden has lost a step on the campaign trail but his capacity to govern is unaffected, that the problem is superficial. This is Biden’s line. “I know I’m not a young man,” he said on Friday. “I don’t walk as easily as I used to. I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to. But I know what I do know. I know how to tell the truth. I know right from wrong. And I know how to do this job. I know how to get things done.”

Biden’s speech calmed some Democratic nerves. He was louder, clearer, feistier. Closer to the Biden of the State of the Union than the Biden of the debate. Democrats asked: Where was this guy? Come on. It is easier to read off a teleprompter than to manage the chaotic, unexpected demands of a debate. You cannot say that the Biden of the teleprompter is a true reflection of the man but that the Biden of this debate answer is not:

For example, we have a thousand trillionaires in America — I mean, billionaires in America. And what’s happening? They’re in a situation where they, in fact, pay 8.2 percent in taxes. If they just paid 24 percent or 25 percent, either one of those numbers, they’d raised 500 million dollars — billion dollars, I should say — in a 10-year period. We’d be able to wipe out his debt. We’d be able to help make sure that all those things we need to do — child care, elder care, making sure that we continue to strengthen our health care system, making sure that we’re able to make every single, solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the — with, with, with the Covid. Excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with — look, if — we finally beat Medicare.

You don’t have to believe Biden is senile to believe he is diminished by age, as we all will be. I worry about the fact that his worst moments come when he is unscripted, like in the debate, or when he stopped to answer questions after his news conference rebutting the special counsel’s report and mixed up Mexico and Egypt. I worry that people around Biden tell me they were unsurprised by his performance, that they have seen him like that many times. This is not the president I want in a pressured, high-stakes dialogue with Benjamin Netanyahu or Xi Jinping.

Biden’s campaign could show us these are flukes, that the president is fast and convincing on his feet. There is no end of adversarial podcasts and TV shows and interviews they could have him do. In polls, he is losing badly among voters who get their news from social media and YouTube. Why not sit for a long interview with Lex Fridman or Joe Rogan or Charlamagne tha God? Why didn’t Biden do the Super Bowl interview? Biden sits for fewer interviews than any other recent president. He gives fewer news conferences than any other recent president. The idea that this is all just coincidence, that none of it reflects capacity, isn’t plausible. Not anymore.

I have heard some Democrats point to Fetterman, who suffered a debilitating stroke during his Senate campaign, as a kind of grim model. He also turned in a bad debate performance, but he won his seat anyway. But he was recovering from a stroke. It was reasonable to expect his capacities to return, as indeed they have. Biden will not age in reverse.

What do political parties do? One thing they do — perhaps the most important thing they do — is nominate candidates. We have a two-party system. Voters will have two viable options in November. The Democratic Party is responsible for one of those options. It needs to make that choice responsibly. What is its job if not that?