The Same Fools Telling Us Not to Panic About Biden Are the Ones Who Let Him Get on That Stage

We cannot trust the political judgment of Biden and his inner circle after this massive fuckup.

Dear readers,

Back in April, David Frum wrote an essay for The Atlantic arguing that President Biden should not debate Donald Trump because Trump violated his oath of office by trying to overturn the result of the 2020 election. Frum argued that sharing a debate stage with Trump would constitute “normalization” of him and his coup attempt, and that the best way Biden could convey that Trump is beneath consideration for another term as president was to refuse to debate him at all.

I disagreed with Frum’s essay when it ran, and indeed I still disagree with it now. Whether we like it or not, Trump is the Republican nominee, he may well become president again, and it’s in the voters’ interest to see a direct confrontation between them. But for today’s newsletter, what’s important about Frum’s argument is not whether it’s right or wrong. All I want to note about Frum’s argument is that it was available — if Biden wanted to duck the debates, this is an explanation he could have given for why, even if his real reason was something else.

There would have been a penalty for ducking the debates, but it would not necessarily have been very large. The press wouldn’t have liked it, and there might have been more skeptical coverage about the president’s age and acuity than we’d been seeing before Thursday. And some voters who worry about Biden’s age and fitness for office might have drawn negative inferences about that from his refusal to debate — but largely, Biden’s polling problems have been with less-engaged voters who are less likely to pay attention to debates, let alone to debates about debates, so I’m skeptical about how much that would have mattered.

Of course, actually doing the debate led to much bigger problems. Now there’s way more skeptical coverage about the president’s age and acuity. And voters, instead of possibly drawing negative inferences about how sharp Biden is, have now seen a naked and appalling display of his confusion and frailty. It’s hard to imagine a more spectacular way for a campaign tactic to backfire — instead of addressing Biden’s age-related political liabilities, the choice to debate gravely exacerbated them.

Biden’s team is famously insular, and the disastrous choice to debate must have been made by a handful of people — Biden himself, his wife, and a few top aides like his campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon and his senior advisor Mike Donilon — who had far more information than any of us on the outside had. While I assumed the campaign’s willingness to debate meant Biden was still able to put up an adequate debate performance like he did repeatedly during the 2020 campaign cycle, they should have known from their close daily interactions with him that there was great risk that he would fail badly. A lot of people are angry this week because they feel they have been extensively lied to by the Biden operation, but I think the situation is even worse than that. Biden’s closest circle were clearly lying to themselves, because if they could have seen this coming, they would not have put the president on that stage.

US President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden stepped off Air Force One upon arrival at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey on June 29, 2024. Biden was in New Jersey for campaign fundraisers. (Photo by Mandel Ngan / AFP)

Now in the aftermath of the debate, the very same people who created this mess have been lecturing the rest of us, saying we are the “bedwetting brigade,”¹ that the campaign’s internal polls haven’t changed, and that if the public polls continue to get worse, that will just be due to “overblown media narratives” and therefore “temporary.”

You will have to excuse me for not believing that these people have any fucking idea what they are doing.

Biden’s team has long had a chip on their collective shoulder, and not always for invalid reasons. Biden would have been a stronger candidate than Hillary Clinton in 2016, and the party’s choice to pass him over for her (a choice implicitly blessed by Barack Obama) was a costly mistake. Biden was a far better candidate in the 2020 primary than the press or operatives or major donors gave him credit for, and The New York Times editorial board really was inappropriately disdainful of him. He really did produce a strong legislative record with a narrow congressional majority, in part because his focus on building relationships across the aisle (which some Democrats mocked or attacked as outdated) was effective for producing results. So Team Biden has come to feel that when they’re attacked or criticized from within the party, that just means they’re the scrappy underdogs, and they’ll prove the haters wrong just as they have done in the past.

But just because people underestimated you in the past doesn’t mean you’re not too enfeebled to run an effective presidential campaign right now.

I am worried that the underdog mentality has sapped Team Biden of situational awareness — that they were so used to writing off the people who put Joe Biden down that they couldn’t tell that it simply wasn’t going to work to put him on a debate stage. And while a lot of Democrats feel lied to when Biden’s team tries to argue everything is fine — his campaign manager says “he’s probably in better health than most of us,” his White House spokesman says “not only does the President perform around the clock, but he maintains a schedule that tires younger aides,” his deputy campaign manager says “the media has spent a ton of time blowing this out of proportion,”— I’m more worried that the candidate and his top staff actually believe their own talking points about what happened last Thursday not being that consequential.

The most unfortunate thing about this situation is that the decision that the party likely needs in the coming weeks — a decision for Biden to withdraw from the race, whether in favor of Vice President Harris or a totally new candidate — will have to come from the same people who seem inveterately incapable of admitting when Biden’s critics are right. And so I think it’s going to be important for them to keep hearing blunt and critical messages from people they would ordinarily consider to be allies, so they might eventually realize the “bedwetting” chorus won’t be going away and might even be correct that Biden needs to step aside.

I think that chorus may get louder in the coming days. I said on Sunday I wanted to see more data before saying firmly that Biden should step aside. Well, we’re starting to get more data. A new CNN poll out today has Biden trailing Trump by 6 points, while Kamala Harris trails Trump only by 2 points. And we’re seeing signs of greater impatience, including increasingly blunt statements from Democratic elected officials, a conference call among Democratic governors to figure out what the hell to do about all this, and at least one senior Democratic member of Congress going so far as to explicitly say Biden should drop out.

On the other hand, Biden is getting new support from a surprising source: The head of a pro-Trump Super PAC is urging him to stay in the race. It’s time for Biden’s inner circle to stop being defensive and understand why Republicans want him to keep running and Democrats increasingly want him to go.

Very seriously,

Josh

1. Incidentally, the last time we heard a lot of this pejorative use of “bedwetting” — that is, as an allegation that a Democrat is worrying excessively about being on track to lose — was during the 2016 campaign, when it was deployed to mock the idea that Hillary Clinton might lose to Trump. It was especially popular among the hosts of the Pod Save America podcast — then known as Keepin’ It 1600 — who used it when expressing their confidence in a Clinton victory. Now, the Biden campaign is now attacking those same guys as “self-important podcasters” because of their own alleged bedwetting over Biden’s debate performance. Given how this all worked out last time for the people who hurled the allegations of bedwetting, maybe we could retire this terminology?