After the Presidential debate, Biden and the Democrats are left to ponder all the terrible ifs

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Suddenly Democrats – their standard-bearer wounded, their electoral prospects in free fall, their assumptions about the November elections shattered – are in a Rudyard Kipling moment, consumed with a mood of despair that has thrust them into the subjunctive mood:

If Joe Biden recognizes that his performance on Thursday night was startling and shocking, perhaps he will stand down from the fall campaign.

If Jill Biden concludes that her husband is facing political and cultural mortification following his failure to sweep away gathering doubts about his physical and mental capacity, perhaps she will convince him that his dignity requires him to abandon what he deeply believes is his two-term destiny.

If a delegation of Democratic giants repeats the 1974 journey to the White House that persuaded Richard Nixon to acknowledge that he had lost his base of support, perhaps Mr. Biden will come to understand that he has no alternative if the Democrats are to offer an alternative to another term of Donald Trump in the White House.

If the public doubts that have haunted Mr. Biden from the start of his presidency – and that grew exponentially from the very start of the CNN debate – congeal into a public outcry, as they almost certainly will, perhaps Mr. Biden, his wife and Democrats will conclude that the choice has been made for them and that a proud President’s stubbornness is yet another reason he must relinquish his party’s nomination.

This juncture summons Kipling’s If poem – written in 1898 about another disaster, the doomed British Jameson Raid in Southern Africa – but with a dramatic difference. The poet of imperialism preached forbearance in the face of criticism, keeping “your head when all about you/Are losing theirs and blaming it on you”– and trusting “yourself when all men doubt you.”

Yet it is in the next line that Kipling, who died a mere six years before Mr. Biden was born, speaks directly to the President: “But make allowance for their doubting too.”

These doubts, repressed for months, even years, now cry out for making allowance that Mr. Biden’s decision to debate Mr. Trump was a turning point in the campaign, in the President’s life, and in the life of the nation. The doubts about Mr. Biden have hardened, and they did so with astonishing swiftness and just as astonishing completeness.

Mr. Nixon’s agony is the obvious analogue to the despair surrounding the White House in the hours after the debate.

In Watergate-consumed Washington, a sad and sober delegation of Republican leaders made the difficult trek from Capitol Hill to the White House. There, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona (the Republicans’ 1964 presidential nominee and the symbol of the party’s conservative wing), Senator Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania (the Senate minority leader and a symbol of Republican moderation), and Representative John Rhodes of Arizona (the House minority leader and thus the leading GOP figure in the body that was about to impeach the president) delivered the sobering news that Mr. Nixon had lost the last shreds of his political support.

It is less clear who could make the case that the Republican trio employed 50 summers ago. It might include Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Senate majority leader and former speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, along with Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York the party’s leader in the House. That replicates the triad of Democratic power: the Eastern Party establishment, women and minorities. But the delegation probably would not include former president Barack Obama, who selected Mr. Biden as vice-president but who spurned his lieutenant’s hopes for an endorsement in the 2016 presidential race. The relationship between the two may be too complicated for this mission.

There are, to be sure, other examples of presidents facing the hard truth: Andrew Johnson raging against the Republicans who placed him on the 1864 ticket with Abraham Lincoln and losing any chance of a term of his own in the early years of post-Civil war Reconstruction. Woodrow Wilson, a stroke victim incapacitated in his final 17 months in the White House rendered irrelevant as the country moved from First World War engagement to postwar near-isolation. Lyndon Johnson, beset with criticism about his Vietnam War policies, stunned the nation with his withdrawal from the 1968 campaign.

Such historical comparisons always have flaws, but the Johnson example has been swirling around the White House for months.

In that case, the 36th president – who though two decades younger then than Mr. Biden is now possessed a visage as beleaguered as Mr. Biden’s did during the debate – framed his withdrawal in uplifting rather than downcast, despondent terms: He announced that the problems of the country were so great that, as he put it, “I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office – the presidency of your country.”

Politics is, as Otto von Bismarck – himself forced to leave the German chancellorship in 1890 after losing support – put it, the art of the possible, and Democrats face a near-impossible task.

It will be difficult enough to persuade the President to abandon his hopes of a second term. Once that hurdle is cleared, Democrats face the task of choosing a replacement. There the thicket becomes even thicker, the questions even more challenging.

Is Vice-President Kamala Harris the immediate front-runner, and does the party owe her the nomination? How do those opposed to a Harris campaign overcome the burden of spurning a woman of colour? Who dares make the first move? Is it the two young promising governors, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, both from swing states? Is it Governor Gavin Newsom of California, the darling of progressives? Someone else?

Then there are the operational questions, as imposing as the political ones.

How does a party that has had a presumptive nominee for months actually choose another candidate? Is it done by the mysterious workings of elders and bosses imposing their choice on a staggering party? Is the August convention thrown open, with presidential hopefuls jockeying to win the allegiance not only of the public but also of the convention delegates who were pledged to a candidate who no longer is running or is deemed to be unfit to run? To apply Winston Churchill to Rudyard Kipling: “The terrible ifs accumulate.”