The bar could not have been lower, nor the stakes higher for President Joe Biden than they were for his prime time press conference on Thursday night.
And while he just barely cleared the bar and likely lived to fight another day, the stakes for him and the nation remain just as high.
Yes, there were stumbles and gaffes. Even before the press conference, he introduced Ukrainian President Vlodomyr Zelenskyy as ‘President Putin’ at a NATO event, and later at the presser, he confused his own Vice President Kamala Harris with Donald Trump. But on the Biden bungling scale those are barely bumps in the road.
More troubling was the soft whispery voice, the now-and-then return to the distant stare, the difficulty finishing sentences, and an awkward reference to First Lady Jill Biden getting angry with him. Still, for Biden these were not jaw-dropping moments, like we saw in Atlanta two weeks ago.
So, did Biden do enough up there alone on the podium, responding to question after question about his mental and physical abilities to save his candidacy or even his presidency?
Rep. Jim Himes, a powerful Connecticut Democrat on the Intelligence Committee didn’t think so, posting on X just minutes after the press conference that Biden should drop out. But the honest answer to whether Biden righted the ship of his campaign is an underwhelming ‘maybe.’
We now know that at least one conversation about Biden’s future has taken place between Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi, grand poohbahs of the Democratic Party. How impressed were they by Biden’s performance? Hard to say.
The underlying problem has not been fixed, because there is still every reason to believe that in the four months between now and election day we could see the Joe Biden of the debate again, even if we didn’t at Thursday’s press conference.
Team Biden certainly wants to believe that the event was a test that Biden passed and that we should all turn the page on the whole scandal. Yet there is very little chance of that, in large part because Biden himself, and his mental condition, are still the main story.
It was telling, in fact, how little news the first solo presidential press conference in months produced about anything other than the president’s fitness for office, or lack thereof.
Under normal circumstances, we would be talking about Biden once again throwing Israel under the bus by answering a question on whether he could have done anything different in response to the conflict in Gaza by saying he wished the Israeli War Cabinet had listened to him more often.
But that ridiculous answer, like every other answer he gave was utterly irrelevant. Nobody was paying attention to the content of the words, just whether or not the president of the United States could successfully say them in order.
The entire political focus of the nation cannot be on whether its most powerful leader is having a good day or a bad day. Not for the next four months, and certainly not for the next five years.
That just isn’t sustainable. The entire political focus of the nation cannot be on whether its most powerful leader is having a good day or a bad day. Not for the next four months, and certainly not for the next five years. Yet, that is still what we are looking at.
For Democrats, this was just about the worst performance Biden could have given. It wasn’t bad enough to open the floodgates on calls to step down, but it wasn’t good enough to make Americans stop wondering and worrying about the president’s condition.
And so we are stuck, right where we were before Biden took to the stage. Even if he stopped the immediate bleeding, and it isn’t even entirely clear he did that, he is still deeply, if not mortally wounded politically.
Joe Biden’s obstinate reply to growing concerns about his age and fitness has always been, ‘watch me.’ Well, Mr. President, we are. In fact it is all we are watching, it is all we can see, and there is real reason to believe that will never, ever change.