Biden’s effort to remain in the campaign has few comparisons

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Dwight Eisenhower approached presidential politics in agony about whether he was a Republican or a Democrat. Former Democratic governor Adlai Stevenson, who twice lost to General Eisenhower in presidential elections, was in anguish about whether to try again in 1960. Democratic Governor Mario Cuomo of New York was so tortured about whether to mount a presidential campaign in 1991 that he let an airplane that was set to fly him to register for the New Hampshire primary idle on the Albany, N.Y., tarmac before ordering the engines extinguished.

But those were private torments.

Now an entire political party – leaders from the White House and the Congress, in state houses and county courthouses, union members, activists and local coffeeshop savants – is holding an extraordinary public debate about whether Joe Biden should remain in the 2024 presidential campaign.

This is not how presidential politics has been practiced in the United States. The Democratic National Convention exactly 100 years ago went to 103 ballots over 16 days but the party’s 1924 torment did not involve a debate about the fitness of an incumbent president. The eventual nominee, John W. Davis, attracted only about a half the votes that Calvin Coolidge won in his re-election bid.

The contemporary Democrats’ torment, which has now stretched through two weeks, flared again Thursday evening when the President – his support diminishing as increasing numbers of top political figures and even White House insiders express doubts about his mental acuity and ability to defeat Donald Trump – subjected himself to a press conference that disrupted the American dinner hour for the political establishment and for voters captivated by this public spectacle.

It came as signs of fresh unease emerged from the White House about Mr. Biden’s continuation in the campaign, as more members of the House of Representatives expressed public opposition to Mr. Biden remaining in the race and as Biden advocates failed to quell doubts about the President among members of the Senate.

This anxiety was heightened when he mistakenly referred to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky as Vladimir Putin, the Russian president who is leading the war against Mr. Zelensky’s country.

The question is whether his press conference performance assuaged doubts about his ability to conduct a campaign or serve another four years.

Though he opened the press conference speaking without hesitation, emphasizing his personal role in leading and extending the role of the NATO alliance, there were awkward moments of silence when he reached for a word or idea. With an obvious emphasis on the words “I” and “me,” and in asserting that “America cannot retreat from the world,” he seemed to be arguing that the party and the country could not retreat from him and his campaign.

As the press conference progressed, Mr. Biden’s answers to questions outside foreign policy grew ever more halting, and increasingly his responses often wandered and ran on for minutes on end. He spoke of “Vice President Trump” rather than “Vice President [Kamala] Harris.” He tried to laugh off his confusion of Mr. Zelensky and Mr. Putin. He relied on a list of correspondents to invite questions – presidents, especially those with decades of experience in the capital and superb relations with reporters, customarily know the identity of the correspondents from the leading news outlets and recognize them without assistance.

Dennis Goldford, a political scientist at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, says the Democrats shouldn’t be having this debate over Mr. Biden’s fitness now. “Where was this conversation well over a year ago? And why isn’t anyone worried about a repeat of the upheaval of the Democratic party convention in 1968?” he said. “For any elected official, the instinct for survival is usually the greatest instinct of all, and that is why this debate is being conducted about someone who is clearly a non-functional individual. They’re doing this in public because they didn’t do it in private a year ago.”

Even during his pre-impeachment ordeal, Richard Nixon ran no public campaign for survival remotely like the one being undertaken by Mr. Biden and his top lieutenants.

Like Mr. Biden, who participated in important geopolitical discussions at the NATO meetings this week, Mr. Nixon dabbled during his period of Watergate misery in international relations, undertaking a 10-day tour of the Middle East as the House Judiciary Committee contemplated impeachment resolutions aimed at driving him from office. But he did not make overt public pleas for survival in the way Mr. Biden has done.

The Biden effort – a campaign to remain in the campaign – has few if any analogues beyond the country’s border.

When Prime Minister Louis St-Laurent appeared open-mouthed after a teenaged boy ripped up a campaign poster in his presence at a late-campaign rally at Maple Leaf Gardens in 1957, it was too late for a debate over whether he should remain in the race. (Mr. St-Laurent’s Liberals were defeated by John Diefenbaker’s Conservatives.) When Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev alienated Communist Party members in the Soviet Union with his crudeness and erratic behaviour in 1964, and when the increasingly frail Leonid Brezhnev (who repeatedly mispronounced names and required his speech texts to be printed in giant type) showed signs of mental decline in the early 1980s, the debates about the Soviet leaders’ tenure were conducted, as the Russian phrase employed at the time put it, “under the rug.”

“The debate about the survival of Biden has been far more public than any controversy in the Soviet Union,” said William Taubman, an Amherst College historian who won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Mr. Khrushchev. “Kremlinologists had to deduce that there was trouble going on. We don’t know what the intimate aides of Biden are saying but the party is having an open debate that would have been off limits in the Soviet Union.”

One similarity between the Brezhnev and Biden cases: the determination of the two men’s closest aides to keep the leaders in power.

In recent days, some scholars have been examining the decline in Mr. Biden by viewing a tape of his performance in the vice-presidential debate he conducted with Sarah Palin in 2008. The contrast is striking, with Mr. Biden, alert and engaged, speaking easily and fluently.

The debate about Mr. Biden is being conducted amid a flurry of second-guessing – and questions about whether Biden insiders, or top Democratic political figures, covered up the President’s conditions and pre-empted an examination about his health.