How are you, Mr. President? - Oppsummering fra pressekonferansen i går - The Economist

 

"How are you?" a reporter asked Joe Biden on Thursday night. "I'm well," the president replied, in a touching moment in a horrendous week.

 

But after Biden's hour-long news conference, it was hard to fully concur with his assessment of his own health.

 

The solo encounter with the press didn’t end his reelection campaign on Thursday night. But it showed why it will be so hard for him to save it.

 

Biden endured his latest agonizing, public test of cognition as he faces a growing torrent of calls from Democrats, worried that he’s destined to lose to former President Donald Trump, to step aside.

 

The president’s deepening reality is that every halting step he takes to tackle his biggest liability — his age and diminished condition — the more he highlights it. And his defiance suggests, he may be one of the last people to realize it.

 

“I believe I’m the best qualified to govern. And I think I’m the best qualified to win,” Biden told reporters at the NATO summit. But as soon as he finished speaking, he suffered yet another Democratic defection — from senior House Democrat Jim Himes — that showed that much of his divided, anxious party doesn’t believe him. Other lawmakers followed before the night was over.

 

Biden’s performance wasn’t as disastrous as at the presidential debate exactly two weeks earlier. In less fraught circumstances, it might have attracted little comment. But it poignantly revealed Biden for who he now is — an 81-year-old robbed of his quintessential bombast and the twinkle in an Irish eye.

 

The president’s warning that he stood as a bulwark against threats to democracy was especially apt against a statesman’s backdrop of the NATO summit. Biden has led the West more effectively than any president since George H.W. Bush.

 

But Biden's every public appearance is now a walk along a cognitive high wire. Each sentence could send him crashing to the ground. And it’s all refracted through the prism of a debate with Trump that sent his campaign into a nose-dive.

 

Even before Thursday’s high-stakes news conference, Biden’s evening got off to a bad start when he mixed up the names of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his nemesis, Russian President Vladimir Putin. He quickly corrected a verbal slip that anyone could make. (Trump, for example, has mixed up Pelosi and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.) But it keeps happening to the president. And shortly afterwards, when a reporter asked Biden to weigh in on the qualities of his vice president, he referred to “Vice President Trump” instead of Kamala Harris.

 

Such slips don’t alone disqualify him from the presidency But, large majorities of voters have been telling pollsters for months that they fear Biden is too old. The debate debacle had the classic political impact of confirming a negative impression that voters have already formed. And every subsequent struggle hardens it.

 

It’s becoming more difficult for Democrats to tell voters to ignore the evidence of their own eyes and to argue that Biden is capable of being president until January 2029.