What’s at issue in the debate over whether Biden should keep running or step aside is far more complicated than just the Democratic Party’s nomination itself.
President Biden’s poor performance at last month’s first presidential debate triggered a panic within his party and even among his supporters. Over the past two weeks, Biden has faced numerous and slowly mounting calls to withdraw his candidacy — two weeks in which little has changed but which brought the November elections two weeks closer. In recent interviews, the president has rejected those calls more forcefully, but he’s been unable to dispel the concerns that undergird them.
It’s a complicated and deeply fraught situation for the president and his party. It involves a number of questions that spill over into one another, few of which have clear or obvious answers. Given that complexity, it’s useful to articulate what is being or should be asked and how those questions might or could be answered.
Is Biden fit to serve as president now?
One of the points of conflation that has emerged since the debate is between Biden’s running for president and his serving as president. Republicans are eager to intertwine the two, to suggest that questions about whether Biden should be the Democratic Party’s nominee are, in fact, questions about Biden’s fitness to serve at the moment. We’ll come back to that former question in a bit.
The and others have reported that signs of his age affecting Biden (as manifested during the debate) have become more common in recent months. There are lots of reasons this might be the case, including the obvious advancement of time and the more subtle effects of the pressures of his position.
But this issue itself poses a difficult-to-answer question: What standard for fitness applies? What are the qualities that a president must possess, and how can those qualities be assessed? How degraded must someone’s capabilities be to pose a problem?
Biden has sought to hold events and give interviews to demonstrate his ability to do the job, but the results are inherently unsatisfying because the standard is so vague. His critics point to verbal stumbles as evidence he is unfit, which sets a very high bar. His supporters point to other indicators as proof that he’s capable, generally applying a much lower bar.
There are tests that evaluate memory and cognition, like the one that Donald Trump always brags about. Even if we had results from such a test in hand, though, the question would probably remain: How does that intersect with the unique job of president of the United States? The odds that such test results would be released seem low, in part because it’s not clear what anything short of significantly dire results would indicate.
We shouldn’t expect such results primarily because the Biden campaign is not eager to fuel the current fire.
