Lampenfieber

 

Cast party at the Waffle House, via New York Times.

John Ganz:

Still, there’s a lot of time before the election. Maybe Biden will spring miraculously back to life and thrash Trump in a later debate. Maybe one day we will all laugh about how everyone pissed their pants. But then again, maybe not. God does have a sense of humor, but it often seems at our expense.

He sprang back to life the minute it was over, at least if your TV was tuned to MSNBC, which showed him glad-handing the entourage and giving a brief improvised speech. Even his voice was back. He was a happy warrior. He looked positively joyous.

The commentators don't seem to know what was wrong with Biden during the "debate", but it was obvious to me in the first, and as it turned out only, sentences I typed about him in the notes I started taking:

Biden seems pretty nervous, his voice is so hoarse and he's speaking so fast it's not fully intelligible. Better in the follow up when he's not reciting from memory.

(I took more notes after that, but they were all about Trump’s stunning torrent of lies and misdirections.)

Performance anxiety. Stage fright. Le trac. Lampenfieber ("spotlight fever"). He's not really good at this bizarre ritual of American politics, though most of the time he's good enough. It's what sunk him in his first presidential run 36 years ago (he was talking too fast then too, spitting out memorized bits of his stump speech, which included those quotes from the UK Labour leader Neil Kinnock, and he left out Kinnock's name in the rush, leading the press to accuse him, ridiculously, of plagiarism, as if they hadn't heard him attributing the material a dozen times before), and the memory of that failure only serves to make it worse. And this time the stakes are incredible. It's him or it's Project 2025! It has little or nothing to do with his age!

I've been there. I did a bunch of acting in my youth, which I was not too bad at, and a certain amount of music, in which I was not so good, and I know how it feels. One real disaster: accompanying a British baritone in a song by Ralph Vaughan Williams which was probably not too congenial to me. The piano part was mostly not that hard, but there was a solo bit at the end, after the singer's part was finished, that I could not master; I choked there at the actual performance and couldn't go on—banged out a C major chord (at least it was the right key) and stopped, and I never played the piano publicly again, which is probably a good thing.

In Biden's case it unquestionably has to do with the stutter. He literally choked (now I know where the expression comes from), which is why he was so hard to hear.

The worst is what a stupid ritual it is, as Lawrence O'Donnell was saying. The TV debate is in every way irrelevant to what presidents do, which is with a roomful of advisors expected to remember everything you might not remember, and not in 60- or 120-second bursts. (I'm pretty sure the time limits were a real difficulty for him—it seemed to me the moderators were cutting him off a lot more than they were Trump, and probably with cause, because Trump doesn't need a lot of time to do what he does, tell a lie or violently change the subject, while Biden needs to work his way through a thought, because thinking is one of the main things presidents have to do, and Trump wouldn't even know where to start on that). There is no reason to ask candidates to do it, nothing about it that relates to a qualification for the job. It's no more relevant to the presidency than a hot dog eating contest.

I don't know what should happen now, other than hating the whole thing. It seems to me that the mechanics of finding a new candidate now, with all the primaries over and all the delegates committed, are just insuperable, unless they choose Harris, and the sniveling centrists producing most of the calls for Biden to step down—Claire McCaskill to Thomas Friedman and Nicholas Kristof—won't like her either. Krugman, no centrist, is an exception:

Joe Biden has done an excellent job as president. In fact, I consider him the best president of my adult life. Based on his policy record, he should be an overwhelming favorite for re-election.

But he isn’t, and on Thursday night he failed to rise to the occasion when it really mattered....Kamala Harris was, by all accounts, an effective district attorney and attorney general, and she has also been quietly effective as vice president, promoting Biden’s policies. Choosing her as his successor would in no sense be settling for less.

It’s true that she didn’t do well in the 2020 Democratic primaries, but her problem then, as I saw it, was that she had a hard time making the case for choosing her over other candidates. She would have no problem making the case for choosing her over Trump.

Biden is the best president of my adult life too, and it kills me to think we might give him up over such idiocy as this. I love the thought of a Harris presidency too, especially as associated as she is now with Biden's agenda, but I have little hope that she can defeat a tag team of American racism and American misogyny, especially in the tumult you can expect within the party if Biden drops out. I don't know what happens next, but I kind of hope it's nothing.