His pathos should not become America’s tragedy.
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.
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.
