If You're a Star They Let You Do It

 

Poster for The Frogs, Trinity College Dramatic Society, Toronto, 1902, via Wikipedia.

My theory of what makes Biden the best candidate to beat Trump is pretty simple, and ought to be cynical enough for anybody: it's that he's the only possible candidate at the same level of celebrity as Trump, with the same degree of star quality and a similar ability to work an audience, his reducibility to a three-stroke line drawing or a meme image (as the smiler in the aviators), or a comic book hero (Sunny Joe as the secret identity of Dark Brandon). Elections are reality shows now, and while that's deplorable in many ways it's where we are at the moment, and the only way out is through.

Kamala Harris comes closest to Biden in reality-show capacity, as she has become in the last months, with the fiery oratory and that warm relaxed laugh, and I'm very glad she's there, but she hasn't been exposed enough, and there are the other issues to consider (is she entirely ready for the racism and misogyny she'd have to cope with at the top of the ticket? Is it even fair to her?). The nice governors seem nice, if you're enough of a news junkie to know, but they don't have any established character as performers; we haven't seen them campaign, and still less have the people who count, the members of the electorate. And there's so little time to do it in! (A season of American Idol takes about eight months to put together, from auditions to finals.) And so little evidence that any of those supposed candidates are even willing to jump in—people, that's not because Newsom or Whitmer or Pritzker is too shy, or afraid of looking disloyal, they're politicians; it's because they've calculated they'd be most likely to lose, they're young enough to save themselves for a more auspicious year, and I think they're almost certainly right.

If Biden were really seriously diminished in capacity to the point where he couldn't do the job, it would be different; it would be his duty to resign (and President Harris, I would add, would be a much more compelling candidate than Vice President Harris), but everybody knows that's not the case—that's why there've been no calls for him to resign. All the more since his meeting with the press after the NATO conference on Thursday, which took a remarkable turn; it seemed to be going the way you'd expect, a debate between Biden and a Greek-comedy chorus—

FROGS

Do you really believe you're up to the job? You think you can convince us?
Brekekekéx-koáx-koáx! Brekekekéx-koáx-koáx!

BIDEN

Look, I'm doing the job right now! I'm not being facetious!

—when rescue appeared from an unexpected deus ex machina, the New York Times Washington bureau chief, David E. Sanger, who came up with an idea I'd had myself

My fantasy for tomorrow's presser Biden: OK why don't you test me? Ask me a substantive question and see if I'm capable of answering. Press corps: Biden: OK, person, man, woman, TV, camera, that good?

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) Jul 10, 2024 at 1:22 PM

and asked Biden a question about the policy environment of the NATO summit, as a way (as he later explained it to CNN) of testing his cognitive capacity:  

Mr. President, the NATO declaration that was issued yesterday ha- — was very notable because it described China as a “decisive enabler” of the war in Ukraine for its provision of critical goods to the Russians....I’d be interested to know whether you have a strategy now of trying to interrupt the partnership between China and Russia, and whether or not in a second term you would pursue that, if you could describe that strategy to us. 

Imagine! Asking a substantive policy question at a presidential press conference, in the middle of an election campaign! The audacity of it! I think there may have been an audible gasp in the audience, but maybe that was just anticipated boredom.

But Biden answered with a tour d'horizon of the whole position that may indeed not have been exciting, but was masterful and comprehensive. He knows the stuff, and he knows how to improvise around it.

And after that was another foreign policy question, from Asma Khalid of NPR, who wanted to get into a more sensitive area, that of the Gaza war: was there anything he'd done since October 7, she wanted to know, that he wished he'd done differently? Biden structured his answer, as I would have wanted him to do, around the parallel with the US action in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks, which landed the US in the 20-year war that he brought to an end:

But that’s why I’m — when I went to Israel af- — immediately after the massacres that occurred at the hands of Hamas, that I — the one thing I said to the Israelis, and I met with the War Cabinet and with Bibi: Don’t make the same mistake America made after bin Laden.  There’s no need to occupy anywhere.  Go after the people who did the job.  

And repeating a few times that he wished the Israelis had managed better and followed his advice more.

He didn't handle this one perfectly. He suggested, as he has done before, that he opposed the US Afghanistan occupation from the start (in fact he voted in the Senate for the AUMF that allowed it—though he has opposed it, as none of the fact checkers seem able to find out, ever since a trip to Afghanistan he made as vice president in 2009, so only for the last 15 years, not 23), and he mystifyingly claimed that Hamas has become less popular in the West Bank, where it has become more popular (in fact it's in Gaza that it has lost popularity in the last months, and it's still supported by a majority there too). But he made it clear that he really has stopped the shipment of the biggest bombs, the 500-pound and 2000-pound ones (though the 500-pound bombs are apparently going to resume), and that his top priority has always been to end the war.

Both Sanger and Khalid slipped little razors of the "age issue" into their questions. Sanger asked him whether, even if he thought he'd be fine negotiating with Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping right now, he could be sure he'd be able to do it three years from now, and he purposely misheard it:

And anyway, but — so, I — I think that I’m prepared to talk to any leader who wants to talk, including if Putin called me and he wanted to talk....I’m prepared to talk to anybody, but I don’t see any inclination. There is an inclination on the part of the Chinese to keep in contact with me, because they’re not sure where this all goes.

Khalid asked if he'd changed his mind about planning to serve a "bridge" term, as he called it in 2020, of transition to a younger generation—why did he need a second term? Biden replied that it was "the gravity of the situation" as 2020 wore on, with the pandemic, and the economic collapse, and the Black Lives Matter outcry:

what I realized was, my long time in the Senate had equipped me to have the wisdom to know how to deal with the Congress to get things done.  We got more major legislation passed that no one thought would happen. And I want to finish it — to get that finished.

Later adding, crucially, that he didn't think nobody else would be able to do it, just that

I believe I’m the best qualified to govern. And I think I’m the best qualified to win. But there are other people who could beat Trump, too. But it’s awful hard to start — to start — start from scratch. And, you know, we talk about, you know, money raised. We’re not doing bad. We got about $220 million in the bank.

By that point, he was clearly getting tired. Every time he started wandering down a tangent of anecdote, he pulled himself up to stop ("Well, anyway—"). But he'd made his impression.

The exchange with Sanger in particular had reminded me of the days when reporters knew something about the issues and a president like John Kennedy could engage with them on a serious level and be personally engaging at the same time. Biden dislikes working with the White House press corps for the same reason as the much younger Obama did (Obama, too, gave very few press conferences and preferred long interviews with a better informed reporter, even a conservative one like Jeffrey Goldberg), because they're incapable of being serious.

But he showed up as a legitimate star, that's the thing I want to stress, when he's all there (when he's healthy, as he has been at least since the active campaigning started, as if the crowds pump him up—he was clearly sick with a common cold and jet lag on debate night, and it wasn't normal; you've never seen him like that before).

That doesn't mean he's going to win! It was always going to be a difficult election, and the media has been even more irresponsible on the "inflation issue" than on the "age issue", especially over the last year, as wage gains have outstripped price rises, price raises have fallen to zero, and the real problem in the economy is the Fed's fearful refusal to start bringing interest rates back down (hopefully it will start in September), which is contributing most to the housing crisis.

But I'm convinced he has the best chance. It will be a better chance if we manage to stop complaining about him and start showing the party some support.