Welcome to Margin of Error, a politics column from Tom Scocca, editor of the Indignity newsletter, examining the apocalyptic politics and coverage of Campaign 2024.
The political crisis about Joe Biden is two weeks old now, an unbroken frenzy of pronouncements and speculation about whether or not the incumbent Democratic president should be replaced with someone else as the Democratic presidential nominee. So far, none of it has changed anything. On June 28, the New York Times editorial board, panicked by Biden bombing his debate against Donald Trump the night before, declared "To Serve His Country, President Biden Should Leave the Race"; on July 8, with Biden still having failed to comply, the board tried again with "The Democratic Party Must Speak the Plain Truth to the President"—upping the urgency from "should" to "must," and pleading for someone else to help them.
Behind the bold position-taking, though, was a subtle evasiveness. What was the "plain truth" that Joe Biden needed to hear? It was, the editorial board wrote, that "his defiance threatens to hand victory to Mr. Trump," and that "he is embarrassing himself and endangering his legacy," and that "he is no longer an effective spokesman for his own priorities."
None of these things were truths about Joe Biden, though, exactly. They were claims—fairly plausible claims!—about how people may perceive Joe Biden, and what the effects of those perceptions may be.
"This is about age," the actor George Clooney wrote in his own piece for the Times, speaking on his authority as a major Democratic donor. "Nothing more ... We are not going to win in November with this president." But why would age, nothing more than age, make Biden lose in November to an opponent who is barely any younger than he is?
What does "age" mean, specifically? Or "age and infirmity," as the editorial board put it in its first piece urging Biden to abandon the nomination? How diminished are the president's capacities, actually?
This is a rude and dangerous question. Right now, Biden is the most powerful person in the world. Our political machinery, with however much democratic input it can absorb, has made him one of the two currently available choices to be elected president in November. The other choice, as the Times editorial board belatedly got around to declaring, is entirely unacceptable, a mentally and emotionally unstable criminal running on a platform of destruction, corruption, and violence. Even the board's initial anti-Biden piece conceded, "If the race comes down to a choice between Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden, the sitting president would be this board’s unequivocal pick."
And so a set of very different ideas about Biden's fitness are collapsed into vague generalities, to prevent anyone from having to examine them too closely. Is the president decrepit, or is he senile? Does he speak haltingly because his speech isn't fluent anymore, or because his mind can't hold coherent thoughts together? Are people afraid he can't convince voters to make him president again, or are they afraid he's not capable of being president again? Do they think he's not capable of being president right now? Does Biden understand his own limits?
The closest the editorial board got to taking a real position was this:
At times, Mr. Biden has seemed to hover on the verge of self-awareness, as when he reportedly told Democratic governors last week that he needs to sleep more, work less and avoid public events after 8 p.m. But he has resisted the obvious conclusion that a man who needs to clock out at 8 should not attempt to perform simultaneously two of the world’s most difficult and all-consuming jobs—serving as president and running for president.
But there, still, was a dodge: the idea that Biden is struggling because he can't handle the effort of a presidential campaign on top of the effort of being president. It's the setup for a polite, no-hard-feelings scenario in which Biden admits the campaign is too much for him, embraces his legacy as a successful one-term president, and lets someone else run on his administration's record and take the fight to Donald Trump.
This is a fundamentally cynical message: The idea isn't that Biden is unfit to be president, but that he's unfit to convince other people he's fit to be president. And what is there in it to convince Biden to quit? He's an effective president, and he has to give it up because his lifelong stutter finally got the best of him on live TV?
Alternatively, there's the premise that something new has gone wrong with Biden's health. Chasing the fumes of the right-wing press, major media outlets just had a news cycle about whether a Parkinson's expert was paying special visits to the White House—when the expert in question was the longstanding neurologist to the whole White House staff, and he turned out to be visiting the White House no more often than usual. With a Parkinson's diagnosis, it could be impartial fate that gracefully put an end to Biden's campaign, with no guilt or blame for anyone involved.
Unfortunately for that scenario, the only degenerative condition anyone can clearly assign to Biden is the human condition. He's too old and he's only getting older. Everybody knew that about him before he even entered the 2020 presidential race.
Does Biden have a worse problem than that? I have no idea. And, fairly blatantly, none of the people reporting and arguing about getting rid of him do either. None of them came up with any revelations that prevented him from winning in 2020, or from becoming the presumptive nominee in the 2024 primary season. No matter how they dress up their claims about the emergency, it only became an emergency when he blew the debate.
If Joe Biden isn't senile, there's no real reason—from his own point of view—for him to drop out of the race. And if he is senile, he wouldn't be able to judge his own condition. Which one is it? And if it's the second one, who's going to do something about it?
Personally, I would prefer not to be guessing about these things. I would prefer not to have been stuck with Biden as the candidate. I do believe that if Biden could be magically replaced with a more energetic nominee—someone with the baseline agility to hear Trump boasting about his record stock market and point out that the market is much higher now—Trump's own decrepitude and general loathsomeness would drag the Republican campaign down to defeat.
But no one is offering any magic. All they're offering are various scenarios that would blow up the entire political structure less than four months before election day, in the hopes that the rubble comes down in a less depressing arrangement. Before announcing it's time to take emergency measures, though, people need to agree about exactly what the emergency is.
