Will there be a second debate?

After Thursday's debacle, have we seen the last of Biden v. Trump?

In 1960 Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy debated each other in the contest for the presidency. Somewhat famously, a majority of those who listened to the debate on the radio felt either that Nixon had won the debate or that it was very close. Those who watched it on television however, overwhelmingly believed that Kennedy had trounced Nixon, who looked uncomfortable, sweaty, and shifty. The moment has been frequently cited as exhibit A for how television elevated image over substance.

On Thursday Donald J. Trump and Joseph R. Biden debated each other in the contest for the presidency. The overwhelming response form those who watched the debate was that Biden looked old, frail, and unfit for the presidency. Trump won by a large margin. I was driving with my family on a road trip during the debate and we listened to the debate instead of watching it. If you’re wondering whether Biden sounded better on radio than he looked on TV…I can tell you he didn’t.

The last 48 hours have been a cacophony of calls from the within the Democratic party for Biden to step aside, followed by more muted exhortations from others to “not panic” and remain calm. Advice from Dr. Jill Biden that 90 minutes can’t define a president or a presidency.

I believe there has never been a presidential debate between the two parties scheduled earlier than this one. Partly that is because we may never have had the two candidates decided so early - with both nominees pretty much set before St. Patrick’s Day. Some have been arguing that the Democrats agreed to set the first debate early so that, if it was a disaster for Biden, they could replace him with enough time to build momentum before the general election. Whether that was intentional or not, here we are.

The question on everyone’s lips is whether there will be a second debate between these two candidates or if Biden will be replaced as the Democratic nominee. Already people are writing about who might take jump in as a substitute candidate for Biden. The list is long. I’m not even touching that for now. And I’m not touching Trump’s own performance and fitness for the job. Today is about Biden: Will he stay in the race? Should he? What would have to happen for the Democrats to run someone else?

In today’s edition:

1. Joe Biden Is a Good Man and a Good President. He Must Bow Out of the Race. - Thomas Friedman, The New York Times

2. Biden’s considerably better speech the next day in North Carolina

3. The Most Important Presidential Debate Ever - Peggy Noonan, The Wall Street Journal

4. How Democrats could replace Biden as presidential candidate before November - Jeff Mason, Reuters

5. Democrats fear a messy convention. Trump should fear their meltdown more. - Matt Bai, The Washington Post

Plus several other takes from various angles in the Postscript, including

• the complicity of mainstream media in building the narrative that Biden isn’t infirm

• Republican calls for invoking the 25th amendment

• a comparison between Biden and the USSR’s Leonid Brezhnev

• Ross Douthat, no fan of Trump, calls for protecting the country from a second Biden presidency

• and, to relieve some tension, Jon Stewart’s Daily Show review of the debate.

Read widely. Read wisely.

Max

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1. Joe Biden Is a Good Man and a Good President. He Must Bow Out of the Race.

Thomas Friedman in The New York Times

SUMMARY

Many have made the case that Biden should step down because it is in the best interest of the Democratic party and in the best interest of the country. Friedman has been one of Biden’s biggest defenders but was one of the first to issue the call for him to step down.

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I had been ready to give Biden the benefit of the doubt up to now, because during the times I engaged with him one on one, I found him up to the job. He clearly is not any longer. His family and his staff had to have known that. They have been holed up at Camp David preparing for this momentous debate for days now. If that is the best performance they could summon from him, he should preserve his dignity and leave the stage at the end of this term.

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2. Biden’s considerably better speech the next day in North Carolina

SUMMARY

Yesterday, less than 24 hours after his disastrous debate, Biden looked and sounded a heckuva lot better than he did on the split screen vs. Trump. I mean, he looked and acted like a different person - energetic, sharp, funny. It surely helps to have teleprompters and a friendly audience cheering you on. It is the kind of performance that might make a guy think he could overcome “a bad 90 minutes” and still win the presidency.

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3. The Most Important Presidential Debate Ever

Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal

SUMMARY

“It was in fact as consequential as any presidential debate in history, and the worst night for an incumbent in history. It was a total and unmitigated disaster for Mr. Biden. It was a rout for Mr. Trump. It wasn’t the kind of rout that says: If the election were held tomorrow Donald Trump would win. It was the kind of rout that says: If the election were held tomorrow Donald Trump would win in a landslide.”

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From the moment he shuffled out with a soft and faltering gait, you could see how much he has declined. He was pale and waxy, and there was something almost furtive in his gaze. His voice was hoarse and feathery, with no projection. His answers were scrambled, halting. At some points he made no sense. At some points he seemed out of it.

Mr. Trump came across as calm, sure-voiced, focused. His demeanor wasn’t insane. He was low-key but high-energy. He obeyed the rules, amazingly, to his benefit. He showed respect for the moderators. If not quite genial he was collected, and he offered a new tack on why he’s running: He didn’t want to, but Mr. Biden, unfortunately, is such a disaster that Mr. Trump has to come back and save the country…

…At the very least you can be sure that Donald Trump will never bother to debate Joe Biden again. He doesn’t have to. He’ll be only too happy to leave it exactly where it is.”

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4. How Democrats could replace Biden as presidential candidate before November

Jeff Mason for Reuters

SUMMARY

Q&A about what the mechanics would actually look like for Biden to step down as the Democratic nominee

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Q: WHAT OPTIONS DO DEMOCRATS HAVE?

A: The Democratic Party has had no real Plan B for Biden as its presidential candidate. He ran virtually unopposed for the party's presidential nomination this year.

He will not be nominated officially until later this summer, so there is still time to make a change and a handful of scenarios to enact one: Biden could decide himself to step aside before he is nominated; he could be challenged by others who try to win over the delegates he has accrued; or he could withdraw after the Democratic convention in Chicago in August, leaving the Democratic National Committee to elect someone to run against Trump in his place.

Q: HOW WOULD A NOMINEE BE CHOSEN?

A: There would likely be a free-for-all of sorts between the Democratic heavyweights vying for the job.

Candidates would have to get signatures from 600 convention delegates to be nominated. There are expected to be some 4,672 delegates in 2024, including 3,933 pledged delegates and 739 automatic or superdelegates, according to Ballotpedia, opens new tab.

If no one gets a majority of the delegates, then there would be a "brokered convention" in which the delegates act as free agents and negotiate with the party leadership to come up with a nominee.

Rules would be established and there would be roll call votes for the names placed into nomination.

It could take several rounds of voting for someone to get a majority and become the nominee. The last brokered convention when Democrats failed to nominate a candidate on the first ballot was in 1952.

Q: WHAT HAPPENS IF BIDEN STEPS DOWN AFTER THE CONVENTION?

A: If Biden steps down after the August convention, the 435 members of the Democratic National Committee would choose a new candidate. The members would meet in a special session to select a nominee.

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5. Democrats fear a messy convention. Trump should fear their meltdown more.

Matt Bai in The Washington Post

SUMMARY

Democrats have had a fear of convention chaos since their Chicago convention of 1968. In 2024 they will return to Chicago and possibly have an even more chaotic affair. Matt Bai argues that might not be a bad thing for them because it will beat Trump at his own attention-grabbing game. I don’t really buy this argument but I appreciate the novelty.

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Parties, like all big institutions in American life, are losing their currency. Nominating conventions barely register on the public radar these days, for the few hours that anyone bothers to televise them while the rest of America is at the lake or the beach. We skim right over the dull choreography of the modern convention; it is the junk mail of prime-time programming.

Unscripted TV, on the other hand, is now the closest thing we have to a culturally shared experience, outside of the Super Bowl. What is the genesis of Trump, if not a national thirst for unscripted entertainment? He represents the triumph of personality over party, a creation not of politics, but of everything that is impolitic and impolite.

If Biden were to accept reality and step aside, for once, Democrats would have a genuine opportunity to match Trump’s theatrical dominance. What better way to recast yourself with the electorate than through a gripping, episodic fight for leadership? What could draw more people into politics than a must-watch nightly drama, with the fate of the nation at stake? I have to believe that Trump — a modern-day P.T. Barnum who feeds off the boring artifice of his adversaries — fears that spectacle more than anything.

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Postscript

You can really work yourself up about politics. Sometimes you need a laugh. So I offer you Jon Stewart’s Daily Show recap of the debate. Maybe his best line was that, in Biden’s defense, a lot of people have a resting 25th Amendment face…

Here’s my take on Biden and what we learned on Thursday: not much. What I mean is, anyone who has been paying attention for the last couple of years has seen multiple instances of Biden performing just like he performed Thursday - needing assistance off the stage, blank frozen stares, mumbling and losing his train of thought. This is not really new. The difference is that it couldn’t be ignored and therefore couldn’t really be spun. Bari Weiss in The Free Press had big takedown of the complicit media “They Knew” saying,

It was a catastrophe for an entire class of experts, journalists, and pundits, who have, since 2020, insisted that Biden was sharp as a tack, on top of his game, basically doing handstands while peppering his staff with tough questions about care for migrant children and aid to Ukraine.

Anyone who committed the sin of using their own eyes on the 46th president was accused, variously, of being Trumpers; MAGA cult members who don’t want American democracy to survive; ageists; or just dummies easily duped by “disinformation,” “misinformation,” “fake news,” and, most recently, “cheapfakes.”

…Here was The New York Times last week in an extensive piece headlined: “How Misleading Videos Are Trailing Biden as He Battles Age Doubts.” The story went on to attempt to convince readers that “there is the distorted, online version” of Biden, which is merely “a product of often misleading videos that play into and reinforce voters’ longstanding concerns about his age and abilities.” 

With forensic detail, three Times reporters compared these videos from various angles. “Some of the videos of Mr. Biden circulating during this year’s campaign are clearly manipulated to make him look old and confused,” they wrote, pulling clips that were meant to debunk the idea that he was either. Watch them. See for yourself.

Republicans smell blood in the water. Colorado Congressman Ken Buck has proposed a congressional resolution calling for members of Biden’s cabinet to invoke the 25th amendment, saying he is incapacitated and unfit to serve.

But that’s not going anywhere. It’s not like Biden was totally incoherent. The sweatiest opinion writers are saying this debate performance proves we have had a shadow government and Biden is just a puppet. I don’t think so. Biden performed great at the State of the Union just back in March. He performed great in North Carolina the day after the debate. Given a teleprompter and a willing audience, the man can still turn it own. The troubling thing is that without the prompter he is showing he also can not turn it on when he needs to.

It is a dangerous thing for the country and for the world to have a weak leader of a superpower. Sergey Radchenko makes this point in his WSJ piece, “Presidential Debate Stirs Memories of Leonid Brezhnev.”

Once Brezhnev’s health began to deteriorate, Soviet bureaucratic interests took over. Détente withered. Soviet overextension worsened. When the U.S.S.R. invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the decision was imposed on the ailing Brezhnev by the KGB and military who had him sign off on the misadventure.

Brezhnev projected an image of terminal decline as the sprawling Soviet empire drifted by inertia. Reforms were put off because no one was in charge. Corruption deepened. Yet party newspapers sycophantically praised Brezhnev’s wisdom, foresight and leadership.

It is not difficult for one to draw the lines to the spectre of an unhealthy American president. The situation raises uncomfortable questions and projections:

…the pathetic sight of Brezhnev in decline has a broader meaning. Why is it that people like this end up running countries? Are there systemic, bureaucratic, institutional reasons why frail old men are appointed—or elected? Is it the fear of change, the troubling uncertainty of a world without familiar fixtures, that makes even voters in democracies willingly embrace leaders who are well past their primes, who have nothing to offer but the sad reassurance that today is better than tomorrow, and tomorrow than the day after?

The consequences of such indulgence are deeply troubling. It undermines faith in the social contract. If we are willing to be led by those who don’t know where they are going, we can’t aspire to build a better future for ourselves. All we can do is drift purposelessly in a violent, vengeful world. That’s what the Soviets did.

If you were leading China with a desire to retake Taiwan, hiw might Thursday’s debate impact your calculus about an American response? What about Russia, Iran or any other group with different interests than those of the U.S.? Ross Douthat, writing “The Dramatic Dangers of a Second Biden Administration ” for the NYT, argues that the real danger to the country is not that Biden loses, it is that he wins:

Yes, presidential aides and cabinet members can manage some aspects of the job for a fading chief executive. But they aren’t law clerks drafting opinions on a leisurely timeline. Their boss sits at the heart of a global network of alliances; commands the world’s most powerful military, which includes a vast nuclear deterrent; and is charged with maintaining a Pax Americana that’s currently under threat from an alliance of revisionist powers. The entire global order will be endangered if there is an empty vessel in the Oval Office, a headless superpower in a destabilizing world...

…Many of the choices his administration has made in response have been reasonable or at least defensible, and his team has done a decent job of working around the president’s tighter limits. But for the same reason that Trump’s incapacities seemed likely to yield dangers, it seems plausible that Biden’s decline has itself encouraged our enemies, and been partially responsible for the gravity of the challenges we face.

That’s basically the argument Trump made at the debate: that he was taken more seriously by our rivals and therefore the world was more stable on his watch. Whether or not that’s been true in the last few years, on the basis of what Biden showed the world on Thursday, I think it would become true if he remained on the job through 2028. On this important metric, the capacity to lead a superpower without the 25th Amendment hanging in the background, he appeared to be not as unfit as Trump but more so.

This reality does not erase Trump’s unfitness on other counts, the stain of Jan. 6 especially. It just means that a second Biden administration would be unusually dangerous for the country in a very specific, very significant way. And replacing him with another Democratic candidate, however difficult it seems, would spare America from the significant dangers of a Biden victory, not just from the risks of his defeat.

These are unusual times. You would think the candidate most likely to bow out would be the recently convicted felon, but like I said, these are unusual times.

Will Biden fight on and try to prove his critics wrong? Will he step down? Who would take his place? Right now we all have more questions than answers. The second presidential debate is scheduled for September 10th. A lot may happen before then.

The Democratic convention is scheduled to start August 19th.

Read widely. Read wisely.