Analysis: Biden buys time, but his campaign is in check every day

Joe Biden’s refusal to resign stifled attempts to remove him from the Democratic ticket on Tuesday (9).

But the president’s abject performance in the debate and the challenge that followed seriously weakened his position in a party already unenthusiastic about his campaign. His terrible two weeks threaten to further narrow the already tenuous path to reelection against a reinvigorated former President Donald Trump, who returned to the campaign trail Tuesday night with a fierce rally in Florida, nine days before accepting the Republican nomination.

Deep unease about the president’s prospects hung over shaken Democratic senators and representatives in Washington on Tuesday as venting sessions took place behind closed doors on both ends of the U.S. Capitol.

But no critical mass of lawmakers emerged that seriously threatened Biden’s control over the nomination, and party leaders in the Senate and House offered clear, if less than effusive, support for the president. Ultimately, Biden’s warning in a letter to lawmakers on Monday — “I am firmly committed to staying in this race” — and the knowledge that primary voters spoke left his critics little room to act. .

But he will face a new test on Thursday (11), when he holds a one-on-one press conference at the end of the NATO summit. Any slip-up or confusion would destroy the fragile piece that Biden has fixed in the Democratic Party’s dam of support.

The spectacle of a party debating the viability, strength and mental capacity of its candidate less than four months before election day sums up the crisis that consumed the president’s campaign. There is little evidence so far that Biden is ready to launch into the series of events, campaign changes and media attacks that many Democrats — including those who think he should stay in the race — have called on him to make. Some Democrats now consider him unlikely to win in November. And for all of them, the vibe is existential because Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, has rarely been in a stronger political position since entering presidential politics.

Biden survives a critical day

Tuesday was seen as a critical day for Biden because it was the first time lawmakers met en bloc since the debate late last month and the July 4 recess that followed. But even as the number of lawmakers calling for his resignation increased, the president has so far this week managed to stabilize the post-debate crisis.

“We want to turn the page. We want to get to the other side of this,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters, although Biden’s dire political fortunes as the oldest president ever means this may be an impossible aspiration.

Still, Biden made one of his strongest recent public appearances when he welcomed world leaders to the NATO summit in Washington on Tuesday, even though the effect of aging was obvious in his diction and movements. “Remember, the biggest cost and the biggest risk will be if Russia wins in Ukraine. We cannot allow this to happen,” he said, while praising the “largest and most effective defense alliance in the history of the world.”

The boldness of Biden’s rhetoric was a reminder that the summit should aim to showcase his leadership as one of the West’s most important leaders since World War II and draw a contrast with Trump, who spent his first term berating allies Europeans from the White House. Instead, the event became a test of the president’s acuity.

White House officials told Kayla Tausche of CNN, that Tuesday’s speech went as planned and that the team hoped Biden could now return to “business as usual.” This is unlikely to happen because each of the president’s public events has turned into an excruciating vigil with everyone prepared for gaffes, embarrassing moments or freezes. And all of his on-camera appearances are refracted through the prism of a debate performance that burned an unflattering image of a struggling Biden into the minds of 50 million viewers. It’s a low bar for a president to deliver a short, scripted speech from a teleprompter at a summit without suffering catastrophe. And Biden’s often glacial pace in big public moments creates poignant contrasts with the force of nature he used to be.

The equation is unlikely to change in the next four months because it is endemic to this confrontation and the president’s decision to run for a new term that would end when he is 86 years old.

Biden needs one of his classic comebacks more than ever

Still, it’s too early to rule out Biden. Voters decide elections, not critical lawmakers or scathing media commentary. The president has repeatedly defied predictions of his political demise and found inner strength in a life marked by personal tragedies and political disappointments. And Trump, the first former president to be a convicted felon, has an uncanny ability to alienate moderate, suburban and swing voters with his extreme rhetoric and threats against his opponents. The former president will be back in the spotlight next week at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, which will likely turn into a MAGA (Make America Great Again) festival that the Biden camp sees as a chance to reinforce the contrast between Democrat and Republican. Strategy that collapsed in the nightmare of the last two weeks.

Most post-debate national polls suggest Biden lost at least a few points to Trump in what was a race within the margin of error. So far, there is little high-quality research in swing states that covers the consequences of the debate. But Biden was generally seen as trailing Trump in many of the battlegrounds that will decide the election before the debate, which he needed to use to restart his showdown with Trump. Instead, he created a reverse momentum that he has not yet been arrested. And it’s not just a matter of horse racing. Biden was unable to use his debate responses to frame a sharp contrast with Trump on the issues most important to Democrats, including abortion, taxes, character and the former president’s perceived threat to democracy and founding values. from the USA. This — along with Biden’s somewhat delusional disbelief in his own 30-something approval rating and the apparent state of the race — has fueled Democratic despair.

That sense of disappointment in Biden was evident as lawmakers attended Tuesday’s meetings, with many refusing to speak to reporters on their way out. A source familiar with the Senate Democratic lunch told Dana Bash of CNN that a trio of senators — Michael Bennet of Colorado, Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Jon Tester of Montana — told colleagues they don’t think Biden can defeat Trump.

“It’s true I said that,” Bennet told Kaitlan Collins of CNN on Tuesday. “I think Donald Trump is on track to win this election and maybe win it by a landslide and take the Senate and the House with him.”

Sen. Angus King, an independent from Maine who caucuses with Democrats, said senators believe Biden should face impromptu situations to answer voters’ questions. King, asked what would happen if Biden stumbled in such situations, responded: “It seems to me that it’s a risk they have to take. If he’s okay, it shouldn’t be a problem.”

One of Biden’s most ardent supporters, Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, defended the president. “We conclude that Joe Biden is old; we found out, and the research revealed that he is old,” Fetterman told CNN. “But we also agree that he’s our guy.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who is rarely reluctant to speak at length, was asked several times about Biden but only responded, “I’m with Joe,” in an apparent attempt to end the line of questioning.

Biden received a boost when New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler, who had privately expressed doubts about the president’s place on the ticket, said he would now support him. But the New York Democrat hinted that his decision had as much to do with the difficulty of alienating the party’s presumptive nominee as with the feeling that he was a strong bet. “I am not satisfied with this. He made it very clear that he will run. He has an excellent record, one of the most excellent presidents of the last century. Trump would be an absolute disaster for democracy; so I’m enthusiastically supporting Biden,” Nadler said.

The president was also supported by the support of the Congressional Black Caucus, a vital power player in the House Democratic Caucus. Many of the CBC’s members are in solid blue districts and may be under less pressure than front-line Democrats, who have criticized the president’s debate performance. Texas Rep. Marc Veasey expressed concern for these colleagues as he criticized Biden’s attempt to recover from the debate. “Everything I’ve seen so far hasn’t shown me that this will be enough to get there. I just don’t think this dog is going to hunt,” Veasey told Manu Raju of CNN. “I think he has a long way to go and I think there are stronger candidates who would be more likely to defeat Trump at this point, but if he says he’s going to stay, (then) he’s the nominee,” Veasey said.

Some Democratic leaders sought to shake their members out of anguish by launching an attack on Trump. “Every member of the House Democratic Caucus has a clear vision of what the stakes are in this election,” said Rep. Pete Aguilar, the caucus chairman. “Donald Trump cannot be allowed anywhere near the Oval Office and his extremist allies must never be allowed to pass a national abortion ban or his dangerous Bill 2025, which would erode our democracy and enable Trump’s worst impulses ,” the California Democrat said. But the force of his presentation at a press conference only served to highlight lines of attack that Biden largely missed in the debate.

There was a brighter mood around the Democratic ticket in Las Vegas, where Vice President Kamala Harris flexed the forensic rhetoric from her bag as a former prosecutor to attack Trump. “I will say that someone who vilifies immigrants, who promotes xenophobia, someone who fuels hatred, should never again have the opportunity to stand behind a microphone and the seal of the President of the United States,” Harris said.

For Democrats who think Harris would be a better candidate than the president, her fiery performance was a reminder of an alternative path to 2024 that Biden has moved to close.

This content was originally created in English.

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