With defections growing and questions about his viability as a candidate and president at a fever pitch, Joe Biden sought to quell those fears Thursday with a “big boy” news conference after his usual hours of cogency — after 7 p.m. on the East Coast, over three hours after he’s supposedly “dependably engaged” for the day.
The “big boy” tag isn’t mine, by the way, which is why it’s in quotes. It was dubbed that by the White House staffers, according to Fox News, and media outlets, both left and right, were using the words.
And as for the “dependably engaged” part, that’s not mine, either. That’s from an Axios report after Biden’s June 27 debate debacle in which Biden’s own staff conceded he was only in that state for what roughly approximates a dentist’s office hours: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
In other words, if that 3 a.m. phone call Hillary Clinton used to talk so much about ever came, would the people who occasioned it be so kind as to wait seven hours for the president to work himself into shape? That’d be super.
So, yes, it was a “big boy” news conference. And, despite the fact that this was supposed to be about NATO, given that the organization is meeting in Washington, D.C., this week, Biden began with remarks that started with the situation in Europe, Ukraine and Russia and quickly digressed to key campaign talking points about inflation, tariffs, border security and other stuff that NATO, quite obviously, has no interest in.
Roughly seven-and-a-half minutes into his remarks, Biden began calling on a list of pre-approved journalists, beginning with Reuters’ Jeff Mason.
“Mr. President, your political future has hung over the NATO summit a little bit this week,” he said, noting that Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi had indicated in an interview that she thought Biden’s decision on whether to stay in the race “was still open,” and that actor George Clooney, some union leaders and a handful of Democratic lawmakers either expressed concern about the state of the race or have “called on you to step aside.”
“How are you incorporating these developments into your decision to stay … And separately, what concerns do you have about Vice President Harris’ ability to beat Donald Trump if she were at the top of the ticket?”
This was the first question, remember. Suddenly, the big boy pants fell down in a hurry.
“Look, I wouldn’t have picked Vice President Trump to be vice president did I not think she was not qualified to be president,” Biden said. “So let’s start there.”
Well, he might have well ended there, too:
BIDEN: “VICE PRESIDENT TRUMP” pic.twitter.com/ERHH4GuFGS
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 11, 2024
The first adversarial question he faces … and he manages to say that his sworn enemy is, in fact, his veep. Good night, everybody!
To be fair, this was probably the worst gaffe of the night, although there no shortages of others. The full event, for dedicated masochists, is here:
Biden, who is portraying himself as fit for what are easily two of the top 20 most strenuous jobs in the world — being president of the United States and running for president of the United States — told reporters he needed to “pace himself a little more” to conserve his energy.
(This is a president who blamed part of his debate performance on jet lag from a trip he’d returned from two weeks earlier, where he reportedly couldn’t attend an 8 p.m. meeting because he needed to go to bed.)
Should Biden resign?
He only took questions from a list of reporters provided by his team, which indicated that nobody who was suspected of harboring probing questions was called upon — although, at this point, the establishment media outlets are hardly as friendly to the Biden cause as they were in the golden years of, oh, 2019 through June 26, 2024.
Perhaps the “big boy” news conference was the worst-case scenario for Democrats. Did he do well enough to finally set at rest any talk of a Democratic replacement before the election? Not even close. The “Vice President Trump” line alone killed that hope.
Did he do badly enough that he repeated the same faceplants of the past few weeks? No. It was rambling and circuitous, but it wasn’t a meltdown.
Did it have bad moments? Plenty of them. And, if you just watched the first part of the news conference, what will stick in your mind most prominently is that he said Donald J. Trump is his vice president and didn’t even go back to correct himself.
Not bad enough to dismiss him, not good enough to rehabilitate him. He remains in electoral limbo. The Democrats couldn’t have hoped for a worse night, at least from their perspective. For the rest of us, we could be assured this wasn’t a bad night or jet lag or a cold, but our declining president.
That his performance was more spirited than the presidential debate, or his interview a week later with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, was simply a question of circumstance.
If he wants to stay, he’s still earned the right to stay, by the rules of the contest — despite the gathering hurricane in the Democratic Party. And his inner circle, sadly for Dems, seem to have him braced and boarded-up for the worst of the storm, even if they don’t have a path to victory.
