Biden’s Heartbreaking Press Conference

So here’s the heartbreak.

Three-quarters of an hour of detailed, sophisticated answers. Mastery of detail. Knowledge of world personalities. Courtesy to the reporters before him. Accurate recall of facts and figures. Justified pride in a record of accomplishment. A spark of sharp humor at the very end.

Also: Verbal stumbles. Thoughts half-finished. Strangled vocal intonations. Flares of unprompted anger. Glimpses of the politician’s inner monologue—resentment at how underappreciated he is—spoken aloud, as it never should be, in all its narcissism and vulnerability.

Art restorers use the term photodegradation to describe the process by which a painting fades. The colors remain present; they just become less vivid. That’s the Joe Biden story.

Incumbent presidents lose or quit for one of three reasons: economic crisis, military failure, or party split. (Sometimes an incumbent is rocked by two at once, even all three, as Jimmy Carter was in 1980.) Biden’s economy is the best since the late 1960s. The United States is not directly at war. And until the June debate, the Democratic Party was united. But Biden’s particular miscues have created the kind of party split that devoured William Howard Taft in 1912 and George H. W. Bush in 1992.

Biden’s press conference tonight was intended to close his party’s split. He spoke as a party man to other party men and women. He expressed a keen awareness of the necessarily self-interested nature of his fellow politicians—“I get it”—when he described how they ask only whether the top of the ticket will help or hurt their own, downballot races.

Two very different things might have followed from that thought—but neither did. He might have tried to reassure his Democratic colleagues that he had some plan to turn things around, for him and for them. He did not do that, other than to vaguely suggest that things could be worse, the polls were not reliable, and other (unnamed) incumbent presidents had bounced back.

Not a line of argument likely to assuage anxious fellow Democrats.

The other line he might have tried could have been a Ted Kennedy–style “sail against the wind” appeal to deeply felt and widely shared party values—the things all Democrats consider worth fighting for and, if must be, losing for. That’s not the Biden way or the Biden language, but it was the only plausible Plan B to buck up his party. He did not execute that either.

What was left was an implicit reproach, a put-down of the downballot politician’s egotism in a top-of-the-ballot race. There was not much “you” and not much “us” in this press conference, but there was a lot of “I”: things I wanted to do, things I’d be disappointed not to finish.

The appealing and important fact about Biden is his expertise in the politician’s trade—so much so that my colleague Franklin Foer titled his book about Biden The Last Politician. The politician should recognize his own dispensability, his own replaceability. That’s why Congress hangs so many portraits on the walls, the great majority of them figures whom only specialists remember—and then only as fit to teach the lesson “He thought he was a big deal once, and now he’s gone. You think you’re a big deal now, but you’ll be gone someday, too.”

It’s human and humbling, a caution that most messiahs are false. But the messiah bug seems to have bitten Biden, of all unlikely victims.

Biden has been an astonishingly successful president. With a wafer-thin majority in the House and Senate in his first two years (and despite losing the House for his second), Biden enacted more major liberal legislation than any other president since Lyndon B. Johnson. He organized the successful defense of Ukraine against Russian invasion, expanded and invigorated NATO, and faced down internal opposition in his own party to stand by Israel in its hour of need.

Over his four years in office, one social indicator after another has turned positive after trending the wrong way under even the pre-pandemic Donald Trump: Crime is down, marriages are up; opioid deaths are down, the number of American births is up. Not all of this was his personal work, but it happened on his watch—and the opposite happened on the previous watch.

The great frustration of Biden’s life must be getting the presidency so late. He sought it in 1988, and again in 2008. He wanted it in 2016. Had he gained the Democratic nomination that year, the country might have been spared the Trump presidency, and Biden might now be completing his second term—uncontroversially aged by the office, but still recognizably himself. Instead, the presidency came to him when he still possessed the vigor and skill to do the job, but while the strength to gain and keep it was ebbing from him. At his press conference, he reminded me of an athlete who still knew where to aim the shots, but who could no longer muster the force to send them home.

As I watched this good man summoning all the power of his will against the weakening of his body, two Broadway songs came to mind. One from the musical Evita:

And the other from Hamilton:

If Biden loses to Trump, the nation Biden believed in does not outlive him. A different America replaces it, one where the presidency can be contested by violence, with judicially conferred immunity for an attempted seizure of power. Collective security will be junked, with American military power at risk of being hired by whichever dictators pay bribes to the president and his family.

Biden’s career has been based on the clear-eyed calculus of political risk. But just as the clarity of his presence is fading with the passage of time, so also does the clarity of his perception seem to be degrading. He remembers what he was, and he wants to hold that former being forever. But time has no mercy for human yearning. It takes, and it does not give back.