WASHINGTON —
I’ve covered presidents for 35 years. One lesson above all sticks with me: Reality is always worse than what you see.
There’s good reason for that. Presidents surround themselves with ambitious, highly skilled people whose job description comes from the old Bing Crosby song — “Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative.”
America’s otherwise absurdly long presidential campaigns have one great benefit, however. Sooner or later, they give voters glimpses of what’s behind the curtain. One of those glimpses arrived on June 27, when President Biden stepped onto the debate stage in Atlanta. For more than two weeks, Biden and his party have struggled over what to do about it.
This week, leading Democrats mostly backed away from confrontation with the president. In part, they wanted to avoid undermining him as he hosted allied leaders for the NATO summit in Washington.
With the summit over now, as of Friday crunch time rapidly approaches, as former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made clear Wednesday.
“It’s up to the president to decide if he is going to run,” Pelosi said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” making clear that she did not believe the matter had been settled.
“We’re all encouraging him to make that decision. Because time is running short.”
I don’t know what Biden will decide. I do know that the talking points he and his allies have pushed — which I’ve heard from pro-Biden readers over the past two weeks — are mostly, as the president would say, malarkey.
No, it’s not just ‘one bad night’
“I just had a bad night,” Biden said in his interview last week with George Stephanopoulos.
Anyone who watched the debate knows in their heart that isn’t true. No otherwise healthy person looks like that, sounds like that, acts like that — even if, as Biden said, he had a “really bad cold.”
Biden has done far fewer news conferences and far fewer interviews than his predecessors. He seldom has an unscripted public appearance. That’s not an accident.
He still has a keen grasp of policy details, as he demonstrated in an hour-long news conference Thursday. Unlike in the debate, at the news conference, he laid out a cogent argument for a second term, saying that his age has brought him both wisdom and experience that make him uniquely qualified to govern.
“I’m in this to complete the job I started,” he said.
Still, his answers wandered at times, and he committed at least one memorable flub, referring to “Vice President Trump,” which Republicans quickly began circulating on social media.
Whether he suffers from a form of Parkinson’s disease, as knowledgeable doctors have suggested to Steve Lopez, or some other disorder, may not be known for years. Past presidents, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, buried details of their medical conditions until the biographies. Perhaps Biden will, as well.
While the diagnosis may remain hidden, however, the symptoms were indelibly on display at the debate.
Democrats who want Biden to stay in the race are wagering he can get through nearly four months of campaigning without that happening again. That’s a sucker’s bet.
No, the polls aren’t lying
You hear this one a lot: “The polls predicted a red wave in 2022, it didn’t happen. Why should we believe them now?”
It’s a lie.
High quality, independent polls mostly did not predict big Republican gains in the midterm elections, although some junky polls released by Republican-leaning firms did so. Pundits who kept talking about a red wave in the fall of 2022 did so despite the polls, not because of them.
In late October before the midterms, I wrote that Republicans would likely make enough gains in big blue states like California and New York to win a narrow majority in the House, but that control of the Senate was up for grabs and that Democrats were poised to make big gains in states like Michigan and Pennsylvania.
I’m not recounting that to brag, but to make a point: If you paid attention to good polling, you had a reasonable sense of where the election was headed.
That was true then; it’s true now.
No, gaining a few points isn’t easy
Yes, Biden has lost only a few points in polls since the debate, and yes, the race remains very tight. The FiveThirtyEight average of polls has shifted about 2.5 points against Biden. A similar poll tracker compiled by the New York Times has shifted 3 points. Both show Trump ahead in the national popular vote by a couple of points.
The few high quality, public polls of swing states that have been conducted show a similar shift.
That’s not good news for Biden. What it highlights is that the vast majority of voters have firmly dug-in positions. Moving even a small number takes some major event.
And, crucially, Biden was already behind when the debate took place. He trailed in most of the swing states and needs the race to shift in his direction. So far, it’s going the other way.
Former President Trump likely will pick up another couple of points after next week’s Republican convention — that would be in line with what usually happens.
There is a good chance, as Biden’s defenders argue, that as election day nears, some Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents who have moved away from Biden will come back, motivated by their loathing of Trump. So the already-tight race may well tighten as it goes down the stretch.
But a shift motivated by animus toward Trump would benefit any Democratic nominee. It’s not unique to Biden.
No, Kamala would not be more risky
Ever since the administration’s early months, a chief argument for Biden running again was that Vice President Kamala Harris wasn’t ready for prime time.
Maybe that was true in 2021 and 2022, but the argument fails today.
Harris has done better in the past year than she did early on. The Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade, ending the national guarantee of abortion rights, gave her an issue that she’s effectively run with.
Abortion rights are one of the strongest issues for Democrats currently. Biden has never been comfortable talking about the issue — his fumbling on it was among the most painful moments of the debate. Harris prosecutes the Democrats’ case articulately and strongly.
Beyond that, Harris offers upside potential that Biden simply does not have.
Yes, there surely are some voters — mostly older, white men — who would vote for Biden but won’t vote for a Black woman for president. They’re probably outnumbered, however, by voters whom the vice president could win that the president can’t.
As I’ve written before, one of the main reasons Trump has held onto a lead this year is Biden’s weakness with voters of color, especially young Black and Latino voters.
Right now, polls show Harris doing only slightly better against Trump than Biden would. But she has potential to generate much more support from those groups. Would that potential become actual? Who knows. If it did, however, the race suddenly would look very different.
A large and enthusiastic turnout of Black and Asian voters, for example, could put Georgia back into play. Similarly, North Carolina might move onto the board, especially if Harris chose Gov. Roy Cooper, whose term ends this year, as her running mate.
Winning Pennsylvania for a Democrat requires running up the score in Philadelphia. Biden lags behind in the state. Harris might well do better.
Finally, Republicans will spend the rest of the campaign telling America that a vote for Biden is a vote for Harris because the incumbent can’t last another four years. If Harris is the nominee, at least she can make the case for herself.
The vice president might not be the Democrats’ strongest candidate. Every time Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg volunteers to defend the administration on Fox News, for example, some Democrats swoon over his debating skills. Others pine for Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer or some other possibility.
The proposed processes for one of those candidates to emerge with the nomination, however, seem far too contrived and complex to work outside of a TV show. (In Washington, if people refer to a scenario as “Sorkinesque,” it’s not a compliment.)
The bottom line is simple: There’s no state Biden currently stands to win that Harris would lose. There are several states she might win that he probably won’t.
Yes, the stakes are very high
“The stakes are high, and we are on a losing course,” Rep. Scott Peters (D-San Diego) said Thursday.
For Democrats, that’s a frightening prospect. A reelected Trump with a Senate majority would be in position to solidify the Supreme Court’s conservative majority for years to come by replacing Justices Clarence Thomas, 76, and Samuel Alito, 74, with younger nominees.
A Republican-controlled White House and Congress would almost surely roll back efforts to combat climate change, reverse Biden’s expansions of healthcare coverage and enact further tax cuts for upper-income taxpayers.
The party would face conflicting pressures on abortion, but conservatives have made clear they will try to restrict access to abortion medication, at least.
For three years, Biden has warned that Trump’s reelection poses nothing less than a threat to American democracy. If he really believes that, the time has come to decide what he’s prepared to do to make sure it doesn’t happen.
What else you should be reading
Poll of the week: 72% of Americans say U.S. democracy used to be a good example for other countries to follow, but isn’t anymore.
The L.A. Times special: NATO’s birthday-bash summit in Washington comes at a gloomy time
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