Democrats keep piling on as Biden stands firm
Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN
(CNN) — President Joe Biden’s critical news conference didn’t end his reelection campaign on Thursday night. But it showed why it will be so hard for him to save it.
Biden endured his latest agonizing, public test of cognition as he faces a growing torrent of calls from Democrats, worried that he’s destined to lose to former President Donald Trump, to step aside.
The president’s deepening reality is that every halting step he takes to tackle his biggest liability — his age and diminished condition — the more he highlights it. And his defiance suggests he may be one of the last people to realize it.
“I believe I’m the best qualified to govern. And I think I’m the best qualified to win,” Biden told reporters at the NATO summit. But as soon as he finished speaking, he suffered yet another Democratic defection — from senior House Democrat Jim Himes — that showed that much of his divided, anxious party doesn’t believe him. Other lawmakers followed before the night was over.
The president is therefore at another fateful moment, teed up by one of his most respected political friends, Nancy Pelosi. The former House speaker, who remains one of the most powerful Democrats, suggested earlier this week that despite Biden’s adamant declaration that he’s in the race for good, the summit’s end should usher in new reflection. CNN reported Thursday evening that Pelosi and former President Barack Obama have spoken privately about Biden and the future of his campaign.
Another decisive moment is now at hand, and Biden is looking increasingly exposed.
Another deeply painful ordeal
No president has undergone a trial by news conference like the one Biden endured. His face flinched as reporters questioned his acuity, and he looked wounded when they confronted him with the words of defecting Democrats. Since he’s protected by a loyal circle of friends and longtime aides — now accused of hiding the extent of his decline — it is reasonable to wonder whether Biden was learning the full nature of his personal and political plight for the first time.
Biden’s performance wasn’t as disastrous as at the presidential debate exactly two weeks earlier. In less fraught circumstances, it might have attracted little comment. But it poignantly revealed Biden for who he now is — an 81-year-old robbed of his quintessential bombast and the twinkle in an Irish eye.
At times — when Biden discussed gun violence, for example — his voice rose, and he shook with passion. At others, his theatrical whispering betrayed his age. And as he reminisced about his years in the Senate and old political battles, he came across as a grandfather remembering a life’s triumphs and losses. This is becoming in most octogenarians; in a sitting president who must project vitality to audiences at home and abroad, it’s politically dangerous.
Still, Biden managed to address reporters for an hour in the kind of encounter many Democrats have been urging him to use to fill his days. He showed himself still able to lead nuanced discussion on national security issues — at a far greater depth than Trump — and insisted his skill at doing the job and a record that compares to any modern Democratic president was proof he was fit to serve a second term and was in its own way a daily test of mental suppleness.
The president’s warning that he stood as a bulwark against threats to democracy was especially apt against a statesman’s backdrop of the NATO summit. Biden has led the West more effectively than any president since George H.W. Bush — and he rightly argued that he was far more in tune with Americans and their fears for democracy than his critics in the midterm elections.
Biden’s impossible political vortex
But while his Thursday performance may have gone down well with voters already leaning toward Biden, the president desperately needs to win over swing voters in states where recent polls show him losing to Trump.
Every public appearance is now a walk along a cognitive high wire. Each sentence could send him crashing to the ground. And it’s all refracted through the prism of a debate with Trump that sent his campaign into a nose-dive.
Even before Thursday’s high-stakes news conference, Biden’s evening got off to a bad start when he mixed up the names of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his nemesis, Russian President Vladimir Putin. He quickly corrected a verbal slip that anyone could make. (Trump, for example, has mixed up Pelosi and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.) But it’s happening more and more often to the president. And shortly afterwards, when a reporter asked Biden to weigh in on the qualities of his vice president, he referred to “Vice President Trump” instead of Kamala Harris.
Such slips don’t alone disqualify him from the presidency. But, large majorities of voters have been telling pollsters for months that they fear Biden is too old. The debate debacle had the classic political impact of confirming a negative impression that voters have already formed. And every subsequent struggle hardens it.
It’s becoming more difficult for Democrats to tell voters to ignore the evidence of their own eyes and to argue that Biden is capable of being president until January 2029.
That political vortex that Biden cannot escape was underscored when CNN’s Edward-Issac Dovere and Jeff Zeleny reported, after speaking with more than a dozen members of Congress and operatives, that the end for Biden’s candidacy now feels clear and it’s just a matter of how it plays out. Democrats are looking to Pelosi and Obama, they reported, to help end a crisis that presents the party with the momentous possibility of replacing their nominee a month before its convention and less than four months from the election.
‘Too little, too late’
It’s a measure of how grim things have been for Biden that his uneven news conference was greeted by relief in his camp. One White House official said that Biden displayed “solid command of both domestic topics and foreign affairs.” The official was not wrong — but the comment ignored that fact that presidents are not solely judged on such matters but on their capacity to communicate and whether they transmit a sense of command.
One Democratic congressman acknowledged that Biden had been “strong” during the news conference. But he added: “This doesn’t address longer term issues and winning.” This is a key point. Two weeks on from the debate, Biden’s campaign is not just foundering on what he insists is “a bad night” but his inability since to dispel the impression formed in Atlanta.
His biggest issue — cited by every Democrat who tells him to step aside — is a sense that he’s almost certain to lose to Trump and open the way to an unfettered MAGA movement monopoly on power in Washington aided by a conservative Supreme Court already remaking the fabric of the nation. “We are doomed if he runs. He’s incapable of running a presidential campaign, and he risks taking the House and Senate down with him,” one person directly involved in Biden’s reelection effort told CNN’s MJ Lee on Thursday night.
Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins his party faces a fateful question. “You have to drop the emotion and the loyalty and love, and say in the next four or five months, is that story (against Trump) going to be told with such precision and poetry and beauty that you will turn around all the numbers that say we are going to lose?”
“Do you want to take that risk?” the Connecticut Democrat said. “Because you’re not just gambling your own political reputation,” he argued, “you are gambling the future of the United States of America.”
Biden is not completely alone. Tennessee Rep. Steve Cohen told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that Democrats need to stop their “fantasy games” and unite to beat Trump. But after stalling momentum against him earlier in the week, the president now appears to be in near terminal political decline.
His evolving tragedy is that the qualities he touted Thursday — the wisdom of age, a strong legislative record, global statesmanship and a lifelong refusal to be knocked down — no longer work against the ravages of time and political gravity.
“I’m not in this for my legacy. I’m in this to complete the job I started,” Biden said.
But the president’s every act of spelling out why he deserves a second term shows why he may be incapable of winning and fully executing it.
The-CNN-Wire
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