Opinion | After the Debate: 'I Don't Think Joe Biden Should Be ...

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June 28, 2024, 5:03 a.m. ET

On the “Matter of Opinion” post-debate episode, hosts Ross Douthat and Michelle Cottle are joined by Ezra Klein, who says, “At some point Democrats have to decide if they want to try to win this election, or it is simply too uncomfortable for them to do anything but be on this train as it derails.”

Below is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation. To listen to this episode, click the play button below.

Michelle Cottle: It is currently 10:55 p.m. on the East Coast and we have convened to discuss the first — and possibly only — presidential debate of 2024. For this occasion, we are teaming up with someone whose voice you may recognize, columnist and host Ezra Klein. Welcome, Ezra.

Ezra Klein: It’s good to be here on the most cursed of all nights.

Ross Douthat: It’s so nice to be here with you, Ezra. Here at the end of all things.

Cottle: No, no. You’re getting ahead of ourselves. But I do want to get started here: First, give me some quick reactions and keep it non-panicked, please. How are you feeling after watching this very special debate?

Klein: I think the problem is that Donald Trump seemed much more presidential than he did in 2020, and Joe Biden seemed much less. Months ago, I did this piece saying that Democrats should consider nominating an alternative candidate at the convention, which is something Ross has also argued.

Douthat: It mattered more when you said it, Ezra, let’s be honest.

Klein: It created a lot of dissension among the Democrats. The argument was that something like this might happen; that as much as Democrats feel — and I would agree with this — that Joe Biden has been making good decisions as President and in that respect seems able to do the job, that he was no longer able to perform the job very effectively. He was skipping the Super Bowl interview, he’s not giving many interviews, he had just given the disastrous response to the special counsel report, which implicated his memory. He was not seeming up to campaigning for the job.

He then gave a pretty strong State of the Union. His voice was strong, he seemed very energized, very vibrant. But the fear that I had had at that time, and continued to have in the ensuing months, was that he has good days and bad days, and the campaign is long.

The debate was a bad day and it is bad to have a bad day on the debate. And on the other side Trump, who is a very erratic performer himself, was much stronger than I’ve seen him in previous debates. He was crisp. He said a lot of things that were straight [expletive] that were brazen, that were bizarre, but he was much more in control. He was able to stop himself from talking in a way he couldn’t in 2020. He was quite clear in most of his answers. There were exceptions to that for both of them. I was occasionally checking in on reaction and I’m watching Democrats fall into a complete panic tonight.

Cottle: Before we get into the ensuing panic, Ross, what about you? Same take?

Douthat: I mean, Ezra’s being very modulated in his entirely accurate description of the worst performance for a contender for the presidency in a major debate since the little-known time that, I don’t know, Andrew Johnson drank too much moonshine. [Laughter]

This was the worst. I think we should just say Biden is too old to be running for president of the United States. You could say he has a cold, which I think was put out. I myself have a cold at the moment. I’ve had one for a little while. It’s a bad cold. I’m also running on very little sleep because I have a newborn child. Still, I’m pretty sure that I am more equipped to be President of the United States than Joe Biden based on that performance.

We can sort of dig into the back and forth of the debate and I agree with Ezra that Trump was, by his standards, quite strong in certain ways. Some of his answers were ridiculous nonsense, wild exaggeration and so on, but I think you could say he did his job. He prosecuted the case against Biden, saying: ‘The world is less safe than when I was in charge, the border is less secure, and inflation was low when I left and now it’s high.’ But really, the Trump part of the equation is just not the important part here. The important part of the equation is: Is Joe Biden still going to be the Democratic nominee? And if he is, the Democratic Party is derelict in its duty to the United States of America. I think that’s the only takeaway.

Cottle: I would like to disagree or be the kind of ray of sunshine in this discussion, but I can’t. I feel a little bit bad when I come out of these debates because, I listen to the policy discussions or I listen to the substance and then I’m like: well, people aren’t looking for that largely. They’re looking for how the candidates sound and how they’re looking. In this case, I am betting that America had a hard time following any of the substance in this debate. It was all about what was a truly hot mess of a performance by the President of the United States. I’m just not sure that anything they said in terms of policy or substance matters.

Klein: Well, let me try to pull out what I think went very awry in Biden’s argument on substance, because I don’t think the problems for Biden were purely stylistic. Going back to the beginning of the debate, I think if you extract what Biden was actually saying, he begins by trying to puncture the bubble of nostalgia for Trump by saying, ‘Look, you all are forgetting what a disaster this country was when Donald Trump left the scene. We were in the throes of Covid, there was a crazy level of deficit spending, unemployment was really high, the economy was frozen.’

But Trump’s attack on Biden is that things are bad now. Inflation is high now, people are mad about prices now, that the world feels out of control now. And in response to that — and this is something I found very striking — Biden fell back in an almost second-term Clintonian way on very specific policies he has passed as opposed to any grand narrative of what he has done. So you kept hearing, you know, bring up Medicare drug pricing, which is something they passed as a very small part of the Inflation Reduction Act.

But if you think about the big narrative of Joe Biden’s legislation — the Inflation Reduction Act, the big climate investments there, the bipartisan infrastructure bill, the CHIPS and Science Act — it’s a narrative about industrial policy, a narrative about innovation, a narrative about spending money, building real things in the real world. Donald Trump had very few accomplishments like that. It was a joke that he kept saying it was infrastructure week but never passed an infrastructure bill.

But Biden was very caught up in details and did not have, I think, a strong grand narrative, except for saying that the economy is doing well by international comparisons, which is true, but people don’t feel it. They feel very upset about the economy. And so there actually, I think, was a substance problem. While he couldn’t land his punches rhetorically, I also don’t think Biden’s overall presentation was strong.

And the truth is that Trump had some strong points in his. A lot of what Trump said about his own presidency was factually incorrect, but he was able to repeatedly deliver the general sense that, if you go back, things felt calmer to you than they do now.

The fact is that, yeah, Russia did invade Ukraine — I don’t think it’s Joe Biden’s fault — and there is a disaster happening in Gaza right now. His ability to coast off of a generalized sense of disorder was, to me, Trump’s strongest argument throughout the night.

Cottle: Yeah, I mean, Trump was much better than we have seen him. And I love your take that the biggest problem here with Biden’s defense of his record was that it was kind of small bore as opposed to big message. Except that even with the small bore, he couldn’t do a straight line narrative. At one point early on he wound up saying something along the lines of, ‘I took down Medicare.’ What? I mean, this was just beyond. And look, I was listening for the substance. I was listening for him to make his case because I think he’s been a very effective president. He has very impressive achievements. He’s managed to get through stuff that, by all accounts, he should not have been able to get through. He had a lot to brag about. And he just couldn’t do it.

Douthat: Yeah, I mean, I’m hesitant, again, to even sort of do normal debate analysis. I would endorse most of what you said, Ezra. I think Trump had clear lines of attack against Biden, based on big things that have happened since Biden took office that people don’t like. And in his Trumpian way, he prosecuted those arguments pretty effectively.

I think that there’s a real disconnect between the sort of pro-Biden arguments about how many bills he’s passed and how the American public actually views his presidency. So I think it’s hard for Biden to come out and brag about specific pieces of legislation. If Trump can just counter and say Americans care way more about the inflation rate than your long term investments in science and technology. Biden would have had to do more than that.

And the more that he would have had to do would have been, essentially, a stronger prosecution of the case against Trump around January 6th, a stronger prosecution of his arguments on foreign policy that, however bad the world is right now, Trump might make it worse.

But again, to me, the central thing about this debate, if you watch the debate with the sound off, the split screen moments where, when Biden is talking, Trump is making his faces, he’s sort of glowering, and he’s jolly, sort of smirking here and there. He looks like a guy who is comfortable being on television.

When Trump is talking, Biden’s face hung slack in a way that I think the optics of it alone, before you even get into the mumbling and fumbling and missteps and stumbling, are so devastating as to render the discussion of what kind of argument they should have been having almost irrelevant.

Klein: I do think that the single most damaging way to think about tonight is to imagine that people are asking themselves: Do I want a Joe Biden, who is three years or four years older than Joe Biden is now, serving as president?

I said back in the day, when I was doing these pieces before the State of the Union, that he can do the job of the presidency, but he can’t perform it? I’ve always thought that line is a little fuzzier than I gave it credit for then. The presidency isn’t just about making decisions. It is also about communicating those decisions. And it is also about persuading people that what you’re doing is the right thing. Very famously, the power of the presidency is the power to persuade, right? That is the classic political science view of the president.

For Biden’s communication capabilities to deteriorate as they have — and this idea that he has a cold tonight — we’ve all seen Joe Biden appear like this before, many times. His answers were cogent. This is not a guy who’s senile, but this is not a guy who I think most people would look at up on the stage and say: I am confident that three years from now he should be getting woken up in the middle of the night to handle international crises. That I am confident that two years from now, if you put him in a room with a bunch of wavering moderate Democrats, or possibly gettable Republicans, that he’s going to be the guy who can make the argument to win them over.

And so on that visceral level, would you hire this guy for the job or the other guy for the job? To me, that was the disaster of the night for Joe Biden. He did not look up to the job.

Cottle: At 10 minutes in, people had stopped listening to the details. I mean, my phone was blowing up with people panicking. We’re not going to sit here and talk about whether he’s senile or, you know, the definition of cogent. His answers weren’t comprehensible. They were much less clear during a lot of this.

And so, when Trump would fire off an accusation about you being the worst president or you’re going to run this country into a ditch, after a certain point, people weren’t listening to what it was that Trump was accusing him of doing. They were just like, yeah, this guy can’t do this. He can’t keep the country on track. And it absolutely pains me to say this, but that’s all people are going to take away from this, that he is not up to the job.

Douthat: To link, or attempt to link, the substance of the debate such as it was to the nature of Biden’s performance, a lot of Trump’s argument on foreign policy, especially, was based on the idea that the world was more stable when he was president. Because other countries were a little bit afraid of him, that they thought he was kind of a tough guy. They didn’t know what he was going to do. He was willing to take out Suleimani and so on. That kind of argument.

And if you’re watching the debate, that argument seemed to be vindicated right there on the stage. You watch that debate, and you’re like, yeah, the guy on the left, whatever his other problems, seems like a guy who would be more intimidating to the leaders of Iran, Hamas and even his pal Vladimir Putin, than the guy on the right. That was just a winning argument for Trump, right there.

Klein: I do just want to tour for a minute on some things Donald Trump actually said. Because I think the one thing I don’t exactly want to say is that the only thing that was happening up there was that Joe Biden was turning in a poor performance. I thought that it was interesting the way Trump portrayed things.

Some of it was just infuriatingly wrong. For instance, at one point he’s like: Before Covid we were having amazing numbers on addiction, nobody had ever seen these numbers before. And nobody had seen those numbers before in the sense that they were at that point record high for drug overdose deaths. And it kept going up post Covid.

But there are a lot of things Donald Trump just said in his kind of Donald Trumpian way that were just completely in outer space, like when he said that everybody wanted abortion sent back to the states — everybody, liberal, conservatives.

Douthat: Well that was smart. I kept waiting for him to say that Joe Biden wanted it. That was what I was expecting, because in fact, Joe Biden was moderately pro-life, once upon a time.

Klein: There was a period when Joe Biden made this argument.

Cottle: Trump was lying like a dog.

Klein: He was lying constantly. I just did a whole podcast about Trump’s tariffs and deportation proposals. I mean, Trump, at this time of high inflation, has an agenda that would unambiguously send prices skyrocketing, right?

You’re going to attach a 10 percent tax to any material of any kind imported from anywhere, and a 60 percent one to anything from China. That’ll drive prices up. Mass deportation would drive prices up. There was so much there, but Trump really did play this one on vibes, saying the border is a disaster, inflation is a disaster, the world is disordered, and Biden was not capable of peeling apart what Trump is actually proposing or doing — which to me is a real problem. Democrats should not be trying to make this election easy for Donald Trump by giving him somebody who makes him look young in comparison and can’t prosecute the case. But it’s also, I think, just worth saying that Trump’s portrayal of his own approach to things was often just totally bizarre.

Cottle: Look, he is pathologically dishonest, and it became pretty clear very early on that he realized that Biden was not in a position to counter anything he was going to say. So his exaggerations, his lies, his misstatements, his spin just got worse and worse and worse throughout the debate.

Biden was unable to kind of muster a straightforward pushback. I mean, he kept saying over and over again, ‘The idea! The idea!’ Yes, we understand. The idea is shocking and absurd, and that is why you need to come back at it. But that was off the table.

Douthat: Frustration is one emotion that one could feel. But we’ve had a lot of conversations over the last eight years about the ways in which Donald Trump is unfit for the presidency. And some of the dishonesty on display tonight, it was not the most extreme example of that, but — I’m happy to continue to acknowledge that Donald Trump is unfit for the presidency, but Joe Biden is unfit for the presidency as well. And that is manifest in tonight’s performance. He is unfit to be president of the United States.

Cottle: So where does that leave this race? You guys have both put forth the argument that he should not be the nominee. Where are you wanting to take it now, guys? What is the big idea?

Douthat: I think Ezra’s got a plan. Ezra, tell them the plan.

Cottle: Ezra always has a plan.

Klein: I don’t know that I’d call this a plan at this point. Look, I think for the Democrats, they have a kind of, it’s like an event horizon they can’t think past of, you know, how would you get Joe Biden out of the race? What would happen?

But if Joe Biden, God forbid, had some health crisis that made it so he could not run, Democrats would not just curl up into the fetal position and hand the election to Donald Trump. They would do what the rules say they need to do, which is they would go to the convention between the moment that happened and the moment of the convention. The people who imagine themselves as plausible Democratic nominees for president would give speeches and go on CNN and do town halls and say things on social media and go talk to state Democratic delegations and try to do the kind of convention campaigning that was how nominations were won for most of American history until the late ’60s and early ’70s.

And then they would try to pick a ticket that they thought could win. Maybe that would be Gretchen Whitmer and Josh Shapiro. Maybe that would be Wes Moore and Gavin Newsom. I don’t think Kamala Harris is a strong candidatebut I think she’s probably a little underrated. I would have much preferred to have Harris up on that stage tonight than Joe Biden.

There is nothing conceptually impossible about going to a convention. You have months, which is how this used to happen. You have, I think, a fair amount of Democratic talent you could try to have waiting in the wings. It is not a safe route. It is risky. It could blow up in everybody’s face. But at this point, the Joe Biden plan is blowing up in everybody’s face. I think you are very close to a situation, which is, you can lose with Joe Biden or maybe lose with someone else.

But if the fate of American democracy is hinging on this election, as Democrats are always telling me it is, and as I think there is a chance that it is, then you should do everything you can to win it. Not doing anything from here, because it’s uncomfortable, and maybe doing something else might not work either, I don’t really know what to say about it.

Walking into this, in Nate Silver’s election model, Trump had a two-thirds shot at winning the electoral college. That was what the model said yesterday. I don’t think it gets better from here. What, it’s going to be the convention speech that is going to resuscitate Joe Biden? It’s going to be some other conviction for Donald Trump? It’s going to be the second debate? Does anybody believe they’re really going to have that?

At some point Democrats have to decide if they want to try to win this election, or it is simply too uncomfortable for them to do anything but be on this train as it derails. But right now, it feels to me like the train is derailing.

One last thing — and I know I’m ranting a bit, but it’s been bothering me. The voters have been telling Democrats this whole time that Joe Biden is too old. It has been true in every single poll anybody has run at any time. And Democrats keep telling the voters they’re wrong. They keep telling the voters they just don’t get it.

Cottle: That’s always a winning take. That’s always a winning approach, right?

Douthat: In fairness, Democratic voters did have a chance to vote for Dean Phillips [Laughs] over Biden.

Cottle: Stop smirking.

Douthat: I mean, he gets the nomination, right? [Laughs] Those are the rules.

Cottle: You’re enjoying this way too much. [Laughing]

Douthat: I’m not — am, you know what? I am actually not enjoying this.No, I mean, I am enjoying it — [Laughs] Look, I have spent the Trump era arguing with people who take the situation with Donald Trump as president extremely seriously and suggesting that you need to see the absurdist side of it. And so in this situation, too, I think it is important to see the absurdist side of this spectacle, right down to what we haven’t even talked about, the great golf handicap debate that closed out this debate for the ages.

Klein: I refuse to talk about the golf handicap debate.

Cottle: Oh my god, no, but guys.

Douthat: But look, Ezra just made a really strong pragmatic case for how the Democrats need to try to win this election, can’t let Trump get in, Biden’s going to lose — if he goes on like this, he’s going to lose.

But there’s also just — the same kind of case that was made against Republicans who went along with Trump should be made against Democrats who go along with Biden now. Biden is a different kind of danger to the U.S. than the instability of Trump, but it is a dangerous thing for the United States of America to consider re-electing the man we saw on stage to the presidency at an extremely dangerous moment in world history. It is morally bankrupt for the Democratic Party to go forward with this man as president. And that has to be said as well.

But it’s also funny. It’s also a little funny.

Cottle: So I have been excruciatingly aware and had many discussions about all of the kind of logistical challenges that people have talked about. When you push out an incumbent president, you’re just asking for a world of hurt. But that said, at this point, the party really is overdue for a good gut check. And I think there are a lot of senior Biden people who need to be asking themselves, what on earth are we expecting to happen to turn this around? And I just can’t come up with a good scenario. So, Ezra, we’re going to go with your plan, right?

Klein: The problem I think the Democratic Party has is a couplefold. One is just simply a collective action problem, and this was also the thing that was an issue around the primaries. As Ross suggested, the only real Democrats who ran against Biden, were Dean Phillips and then, in a different way, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

And I think that might’ve been different if Democrats had suffered the wipe out in 2022 that many people expected they would. But they didn’t. They had a stronger than expected midterm that strengthened Joe Biden’s hand. And it’s very dangerous if you’re Gavin Newsom, if you are Jared Polis, if you’re Gretchen Whitmer, if you’re J.B. Pritzker, if you’re one of the national-level Democrats — Ro Khanna, Chris Murphy, Amy Klobuchar, et cetera — to challenge the incumbent president.

So you see people doing things like what Gavin Newsom is doing, which is running this weird quasi-presidential campaign as a Joe Biden surrogate to make himself stronger for 2028 or look like a strong alternative if something happens and Biden has to drop out.

They still have this collective action problem now. If you’re staff around Joe Biden, you’re going to go up to Joe Biden and tell him he’s got to drop out? I think you should. I said that before, that the only way Joe Biden drops out is if the people he trusts most can collectively convince him to do so.

And this goes, I think, a little bit to something Ross was saying. There’s this argument about Biden. And I think it has been, in many ways, a true argument about Biden, which is that he’s a patriot, a very decent man who cares a lot about the country. He’s been in public service his whole life. I do think at some point that demands he looks at this situation with a little bit more self awareness and realism than he has.

I mean, it was his decision to run again, and he shouldn’t have made it. Does he want to be Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who did amazing things for the country, did amazing things for liberalism, but wiped out that legacy and more by refusing to retire while Democrats still had the Senate.

People saw that coming. I was one of many people who wrote a piece saying Ruth Bader Ginsburg should, should retire and she didn’t. And the cost of that, arguably, was Roe. And Joe Biden, too, might end up in the same position. If Trump is as dangerous as he says he is, then Biden has to help the party figure out how to beat him. And if that’s not through him, then you help them figure out and you clear the way for who it is. If you think Kamala Harris cannot win, then you try to talk to her about that.

Like, I wouldn’t want to do that conversation either, but if that is what they believe, if the thing a lot of people think about is that they can’t imagine doing anything because they’re trapped by their belief that Harris isn’t strong enough, well then, they’re the one who picked her. It’s on them to figure something out.

Like, is this important or is it not? That, to me, is the thing that keeps coming up. Is it actually OK if Donald Trump wins? If it is, fine. But if it’s not, then what? Then you got to do something.

Douthat: It’s not just about Trump here, right? Like Ruth Bader Ginsburg staying on the court. Had Trump not won, or had she not passed when she did, and had she become incapable of being a Supreme Court Justice, her clerks would have written her opinions for her, and wouldn’t have been ideal, but it wouldn’t have been the end of the world.

Joe Biden — I mean, again, we’ve had this conversation about Trump so many times. Joe Biden is in charge of America’s nuclear weapons. Joe Biden is in charge of the Pax Americana at its greatest moment of strain in generations. Joe Biden is in charge of the United States of America at a moment when a bunch of kooky but quite smart people think we’re about to take some kind of quantum leap in terms of what artificial intelligence is going to do.

I’m sorry, if the choice is between the two men you saw on stage tonight, are you choosing Biden for that?

Klein: Between the two of them? Yes, I would choose Biden for that. Absolutely. For two reasons: One is that the thing you just said about Ginsburg is also true for presidents. I don’t think Biden is senile and I think in general he’s been making good decisions, but they are surrounded by staff and they are surrounded by agencies, and who you nominate to positions matters.

So one, absolutely. I’ve watched how Joe Biden has governed in the past couple of years. I saw how Donald Trump has governed. I also see what Donald Trump is proposing. I see what Joe Biden is proposing. I mean, Trump’s 10 percent tariff on everything plan is genuine lunacy.

Douthat: Well no, no, but wait a minute! Donald Trump’s 10 percent tariff on everything plan is a bad idea.But having the Joe Biden we saw on stage two years further on in the midst of a major world crisis seems to me objectively more dangerous.

Klein: Look so far, in my view, Biden has not dramatically mishandled or even really mishandled at all a major crisis. I mean, I have my disagreements with him on Israel policy, but the —

Douthat: Look Ezra, I’ve been an apologist for the Biden foreign policy. I think he did the right thing getting out of Afghanistan as badly as it went. I just interviewed J. D. Vance recently and tried to make the case to him that Biden’s Ukraine policy has been actually pretty restrained and reasonable.I can make the same case that you’re making. But again, there is a role that the presidency plays in the world system that depends on the guy being there. And I think we’re in danger of understating the extent of the limitations that we saw in from Joe Biden tonight, and what it implies for just like the morality of putting him back in charge, independent of the question of how do you beat Trump?

Cottle: So, you’re worried that Vladimir Putin watches tonight’s debate and is like, oh yeah, I can just steamroll him.

Douthat: I mean, aren’t you worried about that?

Klein: International politics is in a fistfight. Like, I really think this is sort of getting a little bit too into the pomp of a debate. They’re not like, the way you do international politics is not Putin and, and Joe Biden go in a back room and, you know, like have a, like a bare chested wrestling match as much as Putin might, might enjoy politics working out that way.

Douthat: It’s not that, but it’s not not that completely.

Klein: I think it is not, not that, but I, or whichever number of negatives I need but I look, if you’re asking me who on the debate I would choose to be president, you’re asking me, as Joe Biden says, to not compare him to the almighty, but to the alternative. My view is that Democrats should not make this that easy.

I don’t think Joe Biden should be running. I’m very clear on that. The place where Democrats are paralyzed in my view is strategically. And I got a lot of feedback on this, much of it very angry. I talked to people who are involved in conventions. I talked to the kinds of people who are delegates at conventions or who would be influential to delegates at conventions.

They don’t believe the party has the muscle for this. They’re not sure who the delegates are. It’s not like it was in the ‘60s where parties knew how to do this and had like a lot of, um, muscle memory on it. And so I think, if people are going to wake up in the Democratic Party and think, ‘Oh, no, we have to do something.’

The problem they’re facing really is what do they do? And so I’ll ask it of you two. Do the two of you actually think if you’re the Democratic Party, you go to a convention and you just sort of open this up on the floor and try your best, or do you try to coronate Kamala Harris? Like, what are you actually saying should happen?

Douthat: I’ve ranted, I’ll let Michelle handle that one.

Cottle: I think that they should have a plan in place before they get to the convention. I mean, if they wanted to go down this road, they need to do a lot of leg work and a lot of organization before you get it to the convention and just throw it open. I think that’s not how it works anymore. I think you would have to have made some deals and agreements. I mean, the party has a good farm team, but I don’t think you can just leave it to God on convention week.

Douthat: I think that, of course, if you’re running the convention, if you’re running the Democratic National Convention, you obviously want to have some kind of plan. But the worst case scenario for — say Biden does his duty — and I think it is his duty — and stands aside, if he stands aside and endorses Harris, then it’s just going to be Harris, right? Say he stands aside and doesn’t endorse Harris, or say you go to the convention and it’s the worst case scenario and it’s chaos and so on, still the end point there is one of two things happen: Either Harris emerges as the nominee, which, still probably the most likely scenario, or one of the Josh Shapiro, Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer group somehow catches fire through some uncertain process, and they become the nominee.

Neither of those are like the apocalypse for the Democrats. Nobody likes the unknown, but it’s not like Dean Phillips is going to walk out of the convention as the nominee.

Cottle: Is there somebody that you would feel comfortable with, Ross? I mean, obviously —

Douthat: Me?

Cottle: And Ezra.

Douthat: I would feel more comfortable after tonight with Kamala Harris than with Joe Biden.

Cottle: But is that who you would feel most comfortable with?

Douthat: I mean, I think Josh Shapiro is a fairly impressive guy among the Democrats, if you’re asking me to just like randomly pick the Democratic nominee sure, Josh Shapiro. Cottle: What about you, Ezra?

Klein: I did a great episode with Elaine Kamark on how conventions work, and I think that you have to go through a process of seeing these people under this kind of light. There was a good interview from our friends over at “The Interview” podcast with Gretchen Whitmer that came out about a week ago, and I thought she performed well there, but I think you need to see people pushed.

If they did something in the next week, if Joe Biden comes out and says, ‘Look, like this is a very hard moment for me but I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m a liability to something bigger than me if I run again. I have great faith in the Democratic Party. I have great faith in the many amazing people who have served in my administration: Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, so on, and I’m going to finish out my term and do the best I can on the crises I’m facing, and the Democratic Party’s going to pick a new candidate.’ I think we would see, right?

And I think that it would be up to people to give speeches. And we could see if, you know, Gina Raimondo, the Commerce Secretary and former Rhode Island governor, is able to catch fire. I do — before we go too far down this path, though — want to at least take a minute and push the Biden apologist line here and see what you think of it.

Cottle: If you say that he had a cold, I’m going to scream.

Klein: If I’m a die-hard Biden guy, here’s what I would say: This was a bad night. If you go back to 2012, Barack Obama in the flower of middle age has a quite bad first debate against Mitt Romney. I mean, it’s like an actual disaster for Democrats. They’re completely freaking out. Chris Matthews famously gives his like total panicked response right after on MSNBC. And that it’s often the case that presidents who are not used to being challenged anymore and are not debating and have no sea legs for this have a hard time on their first outing. And yes, this is what it looks like when an 81 year old has that performance.

This is not who he is. This is not the guy we see in private. It’s not the guy you saw at the State of the Union. It’s not the guy you see in a lot of the speeches. And he just got kind of knocked back. But, you know, he is the incumbent. The economy is improving. He’s going to get better. This is going to knock some clarity into him, I guess.

And in the same way that people didn’t completely lose their marbles after Obama had a bad debate and fell behind Romney in the polls, they shouldn’t do that with Joe Biden now, and that all this debate stuff is — as people always would say at me — Aaron Sorkin fan fiction And that the party’s got Biden and they’ve got to figure out what to do with him and that, he can still have a big comeback at the second debate, which we’re definitely going to have.

Cottle: Because Trump’s going to be up for that one.

Klein: I think Trump a hundred percent will be up for that one. Well, I wouldn’t say a hundred percent. I think he might. That’s the Biden apologist line I could imagine.

Cottle: I totally take your point, Ezra. When everybody freaked out over Obama in the bad performance back then, I was like, oh, that’s a bit much. The problem as I see it this time is that this so fits the narrative of Joe Biden is too old and unfit. The best joke I saw going into this debate was that it was a wellness check for both of these guys, and I do not think the test results came back glowing. The attack is always bad or the misstep is always bad when it fits with what people are inclined to believe anyway.

Douthat: I mean but Obama lost a debate to Romney, like on points. That was just not what we watched here. I mean, I agree, again, with Ezra that Biden also lost this debate on points, like to the extent that you scored the debate, Trump won on points, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.

We’re not talking about how Trump landed some punches and Biden didn’t exactly have a great response. We’re talking — I mean, if you really wanted to push it, you could say it’s Ronald Reagan in the first debate with Walter Mondale, where Reagan seemed a little more out of it.

Cottle: Yep. Had a frozen moment.

Douthat: I mean, if you really want to stretch things, I mean, Joe Biden is too old to be president.

Cottle: My last kind of thought is, do you really think any of this is going to happen? I tend to think we can talk about this all night long, and ain’t nothing big going to shift. The Biden people are going to come out, they’re going to say, everybody’s being too hysterical, these things don’t matter, he’s up for the job, blah, blah, blah, whatever.

Douthat: I think the Democrats are the party of the media and the intelligentsia. It’s pretty hard for a Democratic president to soldier on when he loses the media and the intelligentsia, no matter what his loyal staffers say. And my impression — it’s 11:42 p.m. — I’m just watching TV and reading social media like the rest of you.

Cottle: You’re just riffin’.

Douthat: But my impression is that tonight Biden lost a really important part of his base, which is people who cover politics for a living.

Cottle: Ezra, give us some uplift.

Douthat: No but wait! This is — I know we have to end, but maybe, if you want to be uplifted as a Democrat, couldn’t that be the good news? There are going to be conservatives tonight who are saying Trump did too well, because he’s going to knock Biden out of the race and the Democrats will nominate someone who can beat him.

Klein: I don’t make predictions. I’m not going to play this uplifter or pessimism. The Democratic Party is going through, as we speak, a genuine panic. They were quite unnerved as of last week. They’re going to be in crisis this week, and we’re going to see now if the Democratic Party can act like a party, right?

Is that structure, which sometimes now seems vestigial, like you have the organization of something that looks like a party but — to use a term from Sam Rosenfeld and Daniel Schlozman — that it’s a hollow party, that there’s nothing in the center of it.

Or can it act? I mean, you go back to the 2020 primaries, Biden is not looking great. It looks like Sanders is going to win, and there’s all at once after South Carolina this convergence, through Klobuchar and Buttigieg endorsing him, this sort of movement of the party that sends a very strong signal and helps Biden take the nomination when he was looking quite on the ropes very shortly before that. It’s easy to forget how bad he looked after Iowa and New Hampshire.

And so now we’re going to see. I don’t believe if you gave all the top Democrats right now truth serum, or such a thing, and asked them if Biden was going to win, they would tell you yes.

So now that that is sitting there in their hearts, we will see whether they can act in any kind of coordinated way to do something difficult, which is persuade this guy that he shouldn’t run again and risk becoming the Ruth Bader Ginsburg of this election and destroying his legacy and handing this back to Donald Trump?

Or can they get him to stand aside. And if they do, can they use the party and the convention, the way these things were traditionally done, to try to choose a ticket strategically? If they don’t believe it’s Kamala Harris, then that is politically tricky, but not the end of the world.

By the way, in 2016, the vice president did not get the nomination, right? I mean, somebody else got the nomination because the party strategically organized around Hillary Clinton, not Joe Biden. That was probably a strategic mistake back then. But nevertheless, sometimes the vice president does not get the nomination.

If they don’t believe it’s her because she’s not able to impress people in a kind of run-up period, then so be it. And maybe she would impress everybody in a run-up period. I do think she’s somewhat underrated. But we’re going to see: Is the Democratic Party a party or is it just Joe Biden? Just whoever’s in charge at that moment?

Cottle: Okay well, I’m going to go put on my pajamas and we’re going to call it a night. Guys, thank you so much.

Douthat: Ezra, this was great. You’re fantastic.

Cottle: Ezra, you were such a good sport to stay up with us.

Klein: I’m on the West Coast right now. This is easy for me.

Cottle: Oh, shut up!

Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].

Follow our hosts on X: Michelle Cottle (@mcottle), Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) and Ezra Klein (@ezraklein)

This episode of “Matter of Opinion” was produced by Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Phoebe Lett, Derek Arthur and Andrea Betanzos. It was edited by Jordana Hochman and Claire Gordon. Mixing by Isaac Jones and Efim Shapiro. Original music by Isaac Jones, Pat McCusker, Carole Sabouraud and Efim Shapiro. Our fact-checking team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Michelle Harris. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Annie-Rose Strasser.

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