Joe Biden was totally fine in his interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Friday night.
But, totally fine isn’t good enough.
Having watched the full interview, I think Biden did just enough to buy him some more time in the race but not nearly enough to convince people who watched the debate that he isn’t suffering a decline due to his advanced age.
Which is actually the worst-case scenario for Democrats.
Consider this: Had Biden been awful — like last week’s debate awful — it would have been beyond, er, debate that he needed to step down as the nominee.
But, he wasn’t! Which means that his campaign will (and already is) arguing that a) the debate was a one-off (despite ample good reporting that it was not) and b) he’s on the comeback trail.
All of which, I think, delays what is close to an inevitability now: Biden is not likely to be the Democratic nominee in the fall against Donald Trump.
The sooner that reality sinks in the better for the party. Because I don’t think the polling is going to get better for Biden. And the longer the transition to whoever comes next takes, the more Democrats fall behind.
In total honesty, I now think that the nightmare scenario for Democrats is that Biden remains on the ballot all the way through the fall. I think his debate performance so damaged him — because it affirmed something lots and lots of voters already believed about him (he’s too old) — that he can’t recover.
On that front, this answer from Biden in the interview cannot be reassuring to Democrats writ large:
Remember that this is a party who has argued for more than a year that Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy and therefore Democrats have to do whatever it takes (with whoever it takes) to win.
Biden’s well-I-gave-it-a-good-shot view of losing doesn’t, um, fit with those dire warnings.
I’ll have more tomorrow as I go through the transcript of the interview. If you want to support the sort of work I am doing here, I would hope you would become a paid subscriber. It’s $6 a month and $60 for the year.
Why the ABC interview was a worst-case scenario for Democrats