It's time for the White House to put up or shut up

Shielding Biden from public appearances might be a rational strategy -- and that's why it's a bad sign.

If you’d asked me a year ago, I would have told you that Joe Biden was a reasonably clear favorite in the event of a rematch against Donald Trump.

Not an overwhelming favorite, mind you. But perhaps a 65:35 favorite. The case for Biden seemed obvious enough. Incumbents win re-election more often than not — and, of course, Biden beat Trump in 2020. The economy was beginning to recover from a period of intense inflation, and the labor market was strong. Trump had to fade a number of downside risks, being subject to a series of criminal trials and what looked like it could be a competitive Republican primary. (This was before Ron DeSantis began his long and embarrassing decline in the polls). Democrats were coming off a relatively strong midterm, buoyed by voter concerns about extreme and under-qualified Republican candidates and the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

So I don’t begrudge people who took their time to realize that Biden’s re-election would be a heavy lift. The first time my internal needle began to shift was in late summer, when Biden’s approval numbers remained poor even as the economy was improving and it was becoming more apparent that his advanced age — Biden turned 81 in November (Trump is 77) — was an enormous problem for voters and one that Democrats weren’t going to be able to spin away. Still, as of late September, I thought that (i) it had become too late for a full-fledged primary challenge to Biden, and (ii) Biden voluntarily announcing that he wouldn’t run for a second term was a close call but probably failed a cost-benefit test for Democrats.

Since then, Biden’s situation has become considerably worse. If he were 10 years younger, he might still be a 65/35 favorite. But if his campaign is substantially encumbered by his age, he's probably the underdog. If you’re someone who would rather not see Trump re-elected again or who cares about the election for other reasons, it’s time to face the facts. You need to adjust to the new reality and not be mired in anchoring bias by your previous impression of the race.

What’s gotten worse for Biden? There are basically three categories of problems.

• First, a president’s approval ratings do have some meaningful predictive power at this stage as compared with a year ago. And with the general election matchup all but locked in, Biden’s head-to-head polls against Trump provide some meaningful signal, too. So it’s no longer safe to ignore that Biden has consistently trailed Trump in polls both nationally and (more importantly) in swing states. Or that Biden’s approval rating is just 39 percent and shows no signs of improvement, well below the threshold that would ordinarily make a president a favorite for re-election.

• Second, to borrow the poker term, Biden no longer has as many “outs” — meaning, contingencies that could improve his situation:

  • In the Republican nomination process, Trump is probably going to win all 50 states; he hasn’t gotten bruised up or exposed new fissures within the GOP base.

  • Trump’s various criminal trials are (perhaps predictably) facing delays and the Georgia one is a mess, fairly or not, because of an alleged improper romantic relationship between Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and another member of the prosecution team. Yes, Democrats still have some upside if Trump is eventually convicted of something. But so far Trump’s favorability ratings have only improved.

  • And the economy? Well, it has gotten better and both consumer and investor moods have turned more optimistic. I’ve argued there was never really a gap between economic reality and economic perception in the first place, but if there was, it’s pretty much gone now. And yet Biden’s standing has not improved. On balance, that ought to be a concerning fact for the White House. It implies that Biden’s poor position is not the result of something fixable (the economy) but rather something that very much isn’t — the fact that he’s 81 and getting older every day.

• Third, yes, it’s become even clearer that Biden’s age is an enormous problem for him. As many as 86 percent of Americans say he’s too old in one poll, though numbers in the 70-to-75 percent range are more common — still an overwhelming majority in a bitterly-divided country. There’s also been recent bad news for Biden on this front. In the past couple of weeks:

  • A special counsel report characterized Biden as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”;

  • In response to the special counsel report, Biden conducted an impromptu press conference in which, defending himself against allegations of memory loss, he confused the names of the leaders of Egypt and Mexico and was defiant with reporters in a way that — yes, this latter part is subjective — I doubt many impartial observers would say came across well.

  • Biden also declined to do a Super Bowl interview that might have allayed public concerns¹ — something that President Obama did all eight years in office, Trump did three times, and Biden did in 2021. The White House skipped the interview last year when the Super Bowl was carried by Fox, part of a general pattern of Biden avoiding Fox News. But with the game on CBS this year, there were no such excuses.

Personally, I crossed the rubicon in November, concluding that Biden should stand down if he wasn’t going to be able to run a normal reelection campaign — meaning, things like conduct a Super Bowl interview. Yes, it's a huge risk and, yes, Biden can still win. But he's losing now and there's no plan to fix the problems other than hoping that the polls are wrong or that voters look at the race differently when they have more time to focus on it. Neither is so implausible and it is likely to be a close race. But even the most optimistic Democrats, if you read between the lines, are really arguing that Democrats could win despite Biden and not because of him. Biden is probably a below-replacement-level candidate at this point because Americans have a lot of extremely rational concerns about the prospect of a Commander-in-Chief who would be 86 years old by the end of his second term. It is entirely reasonable to see this as disqualifying. The fact that Trump also has a number of disqualifying features is not a good reason to nominate Biden. It is a reason for Democrats to be the adults in the room and acknowledge that someone who can't sit through a Super Bowl interview isn't someone the public can trust to have the physical and mental stamina to handle an international crisis, terrorist attack or some other unforseen threat when he'll be in his mid-80s.

In November, there was still theoretically time for another Democrat to enter the race. Now, there isn’t: filing deadlines have passed in all but seven states and the District of Columbia. So as Ezra Klein pointed out in a podcast episode last week, the only option now is for Biden to step aside, perhaps in response to peer pressure from Democratic leaders and people inside the White House.

This is a real option, however. Don’t let anyone gaslight you into believing otherwise. The Democratic convention is not until August². This is an option that Biden, the White House and Democratic leaders need to seriously consider. It is very far from an ideal option. But if the past couple of weeks are any evidence, it might nevertheless be Democrats’ best option for beating Trump.

On Biden’s Age and Truncated Sample Bias

A lot of commentators that I respect have pointed out that Biden ought to do more public events that would help to allay public doubts about his mental sharpness. The problem is, one can infer the reason that Biden is not doing them — namely that the White House comms team is rational and has inferred that the cost of doing them outweighs the benefits because Biden is too likely to come across poorly.

Let’s abstract this for a moment. Say that, in any given period of time — maybe over the course of a couple months — Biden has 20 opportunities to do what you might call Improvisational Public Appearances (IPAs). We can define these as events where Biden is not merely making pre-scripted remarks and instead faces sustained questioning from the media, voters or other public figures.

We all have our good days and our bad days. So imagine that we give Biden a letter grade for each IPA, from A+ to F-. Suppose that there’s a pretty wide range, but on average Biden winds up in the C's. You could draw a plot of these that looks like this:

Now suppose that the White House calculates that any performance below a C- has a net negative effect on Biden’s re-election prospects. Moreover, suppose that this is predictable. The White House has worked with Biden for a long time and they know his performance varies based on the setting, who he’s taking questions from, and his fatigue level. So what do they do? Well, they do their best to lop off the bottom part of the graph by making excuses for Biden to avoid these IPAs or never scheduling them in the first place. So instead of the first chart, you wind up with this one:

Nice! Now that you’ve gotten rid of the D’s and F’s, Biden’s average grade improves to a respectable B-minus. However, now he’s doing only 13 IPAs instead of 20. The point is that when we see Biden’s public appearances, we’re only getting a truncated sample. And the results still aren't very good.

The analogy is to an NBA player who’s aging and losing his shot. If he only takes wide-open jumpers, his shooting percentage may remain tolerable — but you can observe the decline in his skills from the lack of shooting volume.

And indeed, Biden is conducting IPAs at a very low volume. Consider this data from Klein’s podcast:

Biden has done fewer interviews than any recent president, and it’s not close. By this point in their presidencies, Barack Obama had given more than 400 interviews and Trump had given more than 300. Biden has given fewer than 100. And a bunch of them are softball interviews — he’ll go on Conan O’Brien’s podcast, or Jay Shetty’s mindfulness podcast.

Or consider this:

Mr. Biden has especially shunned interviews with major newspapers. Since taking office, he has not done a single interview with reporters from a major newspaper.

Every president since Franklin D. Roosevelt, with one possible exception, has given interviews to the news side of The New York Times (historians could not locate one by Dwight D. Eisenhower, although they could not rule it out). Likewise, every president going back decades has spoken with The Washington Post.

This is bad, folks. Biden’s doing a lot fewer interviews than even the media-hostile Trump. And when he does them, his performance is still just mediocre. That’s why something like turning down a Super Bowl interview ought to be highly concerning. It’s a relatively friendly setting — the White House presumably has some room to negotiate factors like the correspondent conducting the interview and the scope, and it’s pre-recored, so there’s an opportunity to formulate a damage control plan if anything goes really badly. Biden still didn't do it.

It’s also why the press conference from two weeks ago was worrying. This was an IPA that Biden basically couldn’t avoid. You can’t respond to your own Justice Department’s claim that your memory is failing by not saying anything at all. And yet when forced to make this appearance, Biden’s performance was poor.

The special counsel report itself was also an example of a forced IPA; Biden had to cooperate or invite an even bigger mess by stonewalling. It's likely that Biden’s sessions with the special counsel, Robert K. Hur, will eventually be made public, so I’m not particularly interested in anybody’s spin before that happens. If the White House thinks anything in there is truly exonerating, it ought to demand the immediate release of the transcripts.

Instead, we got a lot of lame excuses. This was Biden’s official statement, for instance:

In fact, I was so determined to give the Special Counsel what they needed that I went forward with five hours of in-person interviews over two days on October 8th and 9th of last year, even though Israel had just been attacked on October 7th and I was in the middle of handling an international crisis.

This is unpersuasive on every level. If Biden was in the midst of an acute international crisis that required his continued focus and attention, he ought to have postponed the interviews — surely even Hur didn't think it was that time-sensitive. If instead it was just another busy day at the White House — there’s always some sort of domestic or international crisis — well, that’s the nature of the job. It’s the hardest job in the world. Biden was elected on the premise that he could handle four simultaneous crises: COVID, the economy, racism and climate change. Now even one such crisis leaves him overwhelmed, such that he suffers from repeated memory lapses?

Nobody but the most hard-core partisan Democrat is being fooled by these excuses. And even they have their doubts; in the polls, majority of Democrats express concern about Biden's age.

A simple challenge to the White House

So could I, other critics and 75 percent of Americans be wrong about this? Sure. I'm wrong about a lot of things. But if we're wrong about this, it ought to be easy to prove it.

Here's what I'd propose. Over the course of the next several weeks, Biden should do four lengthy sitdown interviews with “non-friendly” sources. “Non-friendly” doesn't mean hostile: nonpartisan reporters with a track record of asking tough questions would work great. A complete recording of the interviews should be made public. The interviews ought to include a mix of different media (e.g. television and print) and journalistic perspectives. For instance, Biden could pick these four:

• A lengthy sitdown interview with the Washington bureaus of the New York Times or Washington Post.

• An interview with 60 Minutes, making up for the interview Biden ought to have done with CBS during the Super Bowl.

• An interview with some sort of center-right print or digital outlet. This could be say the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, or even a team of writers at The Dispatch.

• Wild card. Take your pick. Bonus points for Fox News, though I doubt Biden would do it. Go on Ezra Klein's podcast? Go on Rogan? Just kidding, I think. But Bernie Sanders did it.

This really isn't too much to ask. These are the sorts of interviews that every other recent president has done. I admit that I'm asking Biden to pack in several in a row, but he has to make up for lost time. And the timing is urgent because he and his inner circle have to make sure that he's really up for a second term and that this is the best option for Democrats. If Biden was willing to take five hours to speak with Hur, he ought to to take five hours for this. And if he can't, it's awfully audacious to ask Americans to make him president for another four years.

1. Although the decision was made before the special counsel report was released.

2. Even after that, Biden could be replaced on the ballot — the DNC would choose his replacement. It would presumably be Vice President Kamala Harris at that point although technically it wouldn’t need to be.