After That Debate, the Risk of Biden Is Clear

I joined my Times Opinion colleagues Ross Douthat and Michelle Cottle to discuss the debate — and what Democrats might do next. Mentioned: “The Biden and Trump Weaknesses That Don’t Get Enough Attention” by Ross Douthat “Trump’s Bold Vision for America: Higher Prices!” with Matthew Yglesias on The Ezra Klein Show “Democrats Have a Better Option Than Biden” on The Ezra Klein Show “Here’s How an Open Democratic Convention Would Work” with Elaine Kamarck on The Ezra Klein Show Gretchen Whitmer on The Interview “The Republican Party’s Decay Began Long Before Trump” with Sam Rosenfeld and Daniel Schlozman on The Ezra Klein Show Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Ezra Klein?

  From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:22Ezra Klein?

  So I'm recording this a few hours after the debate ended. It was a very bad night for Joe Biden, which I think makes it a quite bad night for democracy. And, well, there's a lot to say in the debate. I recorded a show with my colleagues over a matter of opinion, Ross Douthat, Michelle Cottle, and so a lot of what I can say is in there. I will say that all of my thinking right now is provisional. The debate just ended. We will kind of see how things emerge. One of the things that you'll hear me say here that I've been rethinking, though, is that when I did my piece back, lo, those many months ago, February, I think it was, about why Democrats should think about replacing Joe Biden at the convention, something I

• 1:06Ezra Klein?

  said in that piece was that Joe Biden is perfectly able to do the job of the president, from everything I can tell, but that he's not really able to perform the job of the presidency. He's not up to the job of campaigning for the presidency. And pretty shortly after I set that out, I felt like that line was a little bit wrong, and I feel more so now. And what I mean by that is that communicating is part of the job of the president. Instilling confidence in people that you can do the job is part of the job of the president. Being able to tell the story of your administration in a compelling way that pulls people into

• 1:49Ezra Klein?

  it, that pulls people to your side, that makes them understand what you are doing and why, and why it is good for them, that is part of the job of the president. And the diminishment of Biden's skills as a communicator, as a debater, his inability to project what you need to project to make people confident is an inability to do part of the job of the president. That isn't to say he's senile or any of the things that the more wild right wing accusations say about him, but it is to say that the very crisp and clear delineation Democrats have tended to make between Joe Biden, who in this telling is perfectly capable at all the functions of the presidency,

• 2:30Ezra Klein?

  and Joe Biden, who has maybe lost a step or many steps as a campaigner due to age. I don't think that really holds. I don't think that most people who watched him tonight will say to themselves, I want this guy as president in three years. And voters have been telling Democrats out on polls, basically the whole time Joe Biden has been president, Democrats, or at least Joe Biden, have not been listening. And now they're going to have to decide whether or not they're going to listen. And I'm not saying this is easy. And I'm not saying that going to an open convention is safe, or that it guarantees a victory. But there's something going on here beyond superficiality, something going on here that I think Democrats need to take seriously. Unless people watched a very different

• 3:15Ezra Klein?

  debate than I did, or most of the people I know did, I think Democrats are going to have a tough time convincing the American people, not that Joe Biden is a good campaigner, but that Joe Biden is physically in a place where they want him as president, when he is significantly older even than he is now. It has always been the line of Biden, always been the line of the top Democrats. It is a legitimate question for people to ask, the question of Joe Biden's age. But they say it in a pro forma way, because what they really mean is it is a legitimate question for us to answer and to tell you that it's not a problem. I think the problem with the debate tonight is that it has probably ended the ability of Democrats to tell the public, this is not a problem. I mean, the hope was

• 3:57Ezra Klein?

  that the Joe Biden of the State of the Union shows up every single time from here until the election, and that is clearly not going to happen. And so now for Democrats, the question is going to be, now what? Here, I'm joined by Ross Douthat and Michelle Cottle.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  From New York Times Opinion, I'm Michelle Kottel.

• 4:25Ross Douthat?

  I'm Ross Douthat. And I'm Ezra Klein.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  And this is Matter of Opinion.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  All right, it is currently 10:55 PM on the East Coast, and we have convened to discuss the first and possibly only presidential debate of 2024. For this occasion, as you have heard, we are teaming up with someone whose voice you may recognize, columnist and host Ezra Klein. Welcome, Ezra.

• 4:59Ezra Klein?

  It's good to be here on this most cursed of all nights.

• 5:01Ross Douthat?

  It's so nice to be here with you, Ezra, here at the end of all things.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  No, no, no, you're getting ahead of ourselves. So, 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, Ezra?

• 5:22Ezra 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 and is something-

• 5:41Ross Douthat?

  It mattered, it mattered more when you said it, Ezra, let's be honest.

• 5:44Ezra Klein?

  Created a lot of dissension among, among Democrats. And the argument was that something like this might happen, that as much as Democrats feel, and I'm, 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 was 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

• 6:27Ezra Klein?

  was that he has good days and bad days in a campaign as long. And 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 crispy, said a lot of things that were straight bullshit, 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. And I mean, I was occasionally checking in on reaction and I'm watching Democrats fall into a complete panic tonight.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Before we get into the ensuing panic, Ross, what about you? Same sort of take?

• 7:19Ross Douthat?

  I mean, Ezra's being very modulated, I would say, in his entirely accurate description of the worst performance for a contender for the presidency in a major debate. You know, since the little known time that Andrew Johnson drank too much moonshine at a... No, I don't, I'm sorry. No, I mean, this was this, you know, short of... I don't even want to say short of. I mean, this was the worst. Biden appeared to be, as I think we should just say he is, too old to be running for president of the United States. And, you know, you could say he had, he has a cold.

• 8:04Ross Douthat?

  I think that was put out. Listeners can hear that 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. I have a newborn child. And I'm pretty sure that I am more equipped to be president of the United States than Joe Biden, based on that performance. I mean, I honestly think, like, 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 being, you know, this being Donald Trump, were, you know, ridiculous nonsense, wild exaggeration and so on.

• 8:47Ross Douthat?

  I think you could say he did, you know, he did his job in terms of prosecuting the case against Biden, saying, you know...

• 8:56Ezra Klein?

  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. I mean, that, you know, that's, that's his argument. He made it. But, 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.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  Okay, we're definitely going to get to those questions. But, I mean, I would like, I would like to disagree or be the kind of ray of sunshine in this discussion, but I can't. I, I've tried, I've sat here, I'm like, what can I say that's going to put a positive spin on this? So I, I do think that, you know, ordinarily, I feel a little bit bad when I come out of these debates because I, I listen to the policy discussions or I listen to kind of the substance and then I'm like, well, people aren't looking for that largely. They're looking for how the candidates sound

• 10:05Speaker 01

  and, you know, how they're looking and how they're, 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. And I'm just not sure that anything they said in terms of policy or substance matters.

• 10:32Ezra Klein?

  Well, let me try to pull out what I think went very awry in, in Biden's argument on substance, because I don't think the problems for Biden were purely stylistic. So I think if you extract, going back to the beginning of the debate, what Biden was actually saying, he, he begins by trying to puncture the bubble of nostalgia for Trump by saying, look, you, 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, that inflation is high now, that people are mad about prices now, that the world feels out of control now.

• 11:18Ezra Klein?

  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 him, you know, bring up Medicare drug pricing, which is a, something they passed as a very small part of the Inflation Reduction Act. There were things he brought up, but you know, if you think about the big narrative of Joe Biden's legislation, right, 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.

• 12:01Ezra Klein?

  Well, Donald Trump had very few accomplishments like that, you know, it was a joke that he kept saying it was infrastructure week and never passing an infrastructure bill. 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, you know, don't feel it. They, they, they feel very upset about the economy. And, and so there actually, I think, was a substance problem. I don't think Biden, while he couldn't land rhetorically his punches, I also don't think his overall presentation was strong. And the truth is that I think that Trump had some strong points in his, a lot of what Trump said about his own presidency, I think, was factually incorrect.

• 12:42Ezra Klein?

  But the general sense that, that he pushed, which is like, you know, if you go back, things felt calmer to you than they do now. It was clear he was able to deliver repeatedly. And the fact that, yeah, there is a, I mean, Russia did invade Ukraine. I don't think it's Joe Biden's fault. Like, there is a disaster happening in Gaza right now. His ability to coast off of a general sense of disorder was, to me, his sort of strongest argument throughout the night.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, Trump was much better than we have seen him in many opportunities. And I love your take. I, I, I just love the idea 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 so, look, I was listening for the substance. I was listening for him to make his case because

• 13:48Speaker 01

  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.

• 14:06Ross 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. Yeah, I think Trump, 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, you know, in his Trumpian way, he prosecuted those arguments pretty effectively. Biden, I mean, 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

• 14:51Ross Douthat?

  views his presidency, right? 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, right? Like 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 than however bad the world is right now, Trump might make it worse. But again, like, to me, the central thing about this debate, like,

• 15:35Ross Douthat?

  you watch the debate with the sound off, right? The split screen moments where when Biden is talking, Trump is Trump, you know, he's making his faces, he's sort of glowering and he's jowly and, you know, and sort of smirking here and there, like, but, you know, he, he looks like a guy who is, you know, comfortable being on television, right? When Trump is talking, Biden's face hung slack in a way that I just, again, I, I, I think the optics of it alone, before you even get into the mumbling and fumbling and missteps and stumbling,

• 16:14Ross Douthat?

  the optics alone are so devastating as to render the discussion of, you know, what, what kind of argument they should have been having almost irrelevant.

• 16:24Ezra 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, you know, before the State of the Union, that look like he can, he can do the job of the presidency, but he can't perform it. I've always thought like that, that line is a little fuzzier than I gave it credit for then, because the presidency isn't just about making decisions. It is also about communicating those decisions. And it is

• 17:07Ezra Klein?

  also about persuading people that what you're doing is the right thing, right? Very famously, the, the power of the presidency is a power to persuade, right? That is like 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

• 17:51Ezra Klein?

  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, that, you know, 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.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  Let's take a quick break and we'll be right back.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  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, kind of the definition of cogent. His answers weren't comprehensible. They were not, 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 kind of what it was that Trump was accusing him of doing, running the country into the ditch. They're just like, yeah,

• 19:15Speaker 01

  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, is that he is not up to the job.

• 19:31Ross 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 Soleimani and so on, right? I mean, that that 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,

• 20:11Ross Douthat?

  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. Like, that that that was just a winning argument for Trump, right there.

• 20:26Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, 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 Joe Biden was turning in a poor performance. Because I thought that it was interesting, the way Trump portrayed things. So some of it was just like infuriatingly wrong. So for instance, at one point, he's like, before COVID, we're having amazing numbers on addiction, right? Like, nobody had ever seen these numbers before. Nobody had seen those numbers before, in the sense that they were, at that point, a record high for drug overdose deaths. And it kept going up post-COVID. But, you know, there are

• 21:08Ezra Klein?

  a lot of things Donald Trump just said in his kind of Donald Trumpian way, that were just completely in outer space. You know, when he said that everybody wanted abortion sent back to the states, everybody, liberal, conservative.

• 21:22Ross Douthat?

  Well, that's smart. I kept waiting for him to say that Joe Biden wanted it, right? Because Joe, that I was, that was what I was expecting, because, in fact, Joe Biden was moderately pro-life, once upon a time.

• 21:33Ezra Klein?

  There was a period when Joe Biden, when Joe Biden made this argument. Look, he was lying like a dog. So he was lying constantly. It was really frustrating to me. 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 gonna tap a 10, you're gonna attach a 10% tax to any material of any kind imported from anywhere. Add a 60% one to anything from China. That'll drive prices up. Mass deportation would drive prices up, right? You know, there was so much there. I mean, Trump really did play this one on vibes, right? Like, the border is a disaster. Inflation is a disaster. The world is disordered.

• 22:18Ezra Klein?

  And there was no, I mean, Biden was not capable of peeling apart what Trump is actually proposing or doing, which, again, to me, is a real problem. I mean, 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 prosecute the case. But it's also, I think, just worth saying that, yeah, like, Trump's, like, portrayal of his own approach to things was often just totally bizarre.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  Look, he is, 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 gonna say. So his exaggerations, his lies, his misstatements, his spin just got worse and worse and worse throughout the debate. It's just Biden was unable to kind of muster a straightforward pushback. I mean, he kept saying over and over again, "The idea, the idea." I mean, that was, every response was, "The idea." Yes, we, we understand. The idea is shocking and absurd, and that is why you need to come back at it.

• 23:33Speaker 01

  But that was off the table.

• 23:35Ezra Klein?

  It's, but it's not, I mean, frustration is one.

• 23:39Ross Douthat?

  Emotion that one could feel, but you know, I mean, we've, 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, you know, some of the dishonesty on display tonight, it's not, not the most extreme example of that, but you know, 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.

• 24:12Speaker 01

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

• 24:29Ross Douthat?

  I think Ezra's got a plan. Ezra, tell him the plan.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  Ezra always has a plan.

• 24:34Ezra Klein?

  I don't know that I would call this a plan at this point. Look, I, I often try to get people to imagine this in this way, because I think for the Democrats, they have a kind of, it's like an event horizon that they can't think past of 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 imagined themselves as plausible Democratic nominees for president would give speeches

• 25:19Ezra Klein?

  and go on CNN and do town halls and, you know, say things on, 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 till the late sixties and early seventies.

• 25:38Ezra Klein?

  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. They have the issue that even though I don't think Kamala Harris is a strong candidate. I said back then, and I believe tonight was proof of this, that I think she's probably a little underrated. I would have much preferred to have Harris up on that stage tonight than Joe Biden. But because they don't believe Harris is a strong candidate, because they can't see a way around it nominating her, that they don't think would fracture the party. But there is nothing conceptually impossible about going to a convention. You have months, which is like how this used to happen. You have, I think, a fair amount of Democratic talent. You could, you know, try to have waiting in the wings.

• 26:23Ezra Klein?

  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. Right? 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. Like, walking into this, in Nate Silver's election model, Trump had a two-thirds shot at winning the Electoral College, right?

• 27:08Ezra Klein?

  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? It 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? I don't. 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. And like, 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. And you just can't do this when they can see it.

• 27:52Ezra Klein?

  You can't do it when it's visible.

• 27:54Ross Douthat?

  In fairness, Democratic voters did have a chance to vote for Dean Phillips, right? I mean, you know, over- Stop smirking. Over Biden. I mean, I mean, he gets, he gets the nomination, right? This, that, those are the rules. You're enjoying this way too much. You know what? I'm actually not enjoying this. No, I am, I mean, I am enjoying it. I mean, you, you have to, look, 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.

• 28:34Ross Douthat?

  And so in this situation too, I think it is important to see the absurdist side of the spectacle, right down to what we haven't even talked about, the great golf handicap debate that closed out this debate for the ages. I refuse to talk about the golf handicap debate. Oh, my God, no, but guys- So that's all amazing, but look, Ezra just made a really strong pragmatic case, right? For how the Democrats need to, you know, try to win this election, can't let Trump get in, Biden's gonna lose. If he goes on like this, he's gonna 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.

• 29:18Ross Douthat?

  Biden is a different kind of danger to the US 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, but it's also funny. It's also a little funny.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  Let's take a quick break here and we'll be right back.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  So I have been excruciatingly aware and had many discussions about all of the kind of logistical challenges that people have talked to me. Like, when you push out an incumbent president, you are just asking for a world of hurt. But that said, at this point, the party really is overdue for a good gut check as to what they think is going to happen. And I think there are a lot of senior Biden people who need to be asking themselves, like, 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 gonna, we're gonna go with your plan, right?

• 30:48Ezra Klein?

  The problem I think the Democratic Party has is couple-fold. One is just simply a collective action problem. And this was also the thing that was an issue around the primaries. As Ross said, or suggested, the only real Democrats who ran against Biden were Dean Phillips and then, in a different way, RFK Jr. And I think that might have been different if Democrats had suffered the wipeout 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

• 31:28Ezra Klein?

  you're Gretchen Whitmer, if you're JB Pritzker, if you're one of the national-level Democrats, you know, Ro Khanna, Chris Murphy, et cetera, Amy Klobuchar, to challenge the incumbent president. So, you know, so you see people doing things like what Gavin Newsom is doing, which is running this weird quasi-presidential campaign, like, as a Joe Biden surrogate, to, like, 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. You know, if your staff around Joe Biden, um, you know, would it be you're going to go 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.

• 32:13Ezra Klein?

  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. He's a patriot. He's a very decent man. He cares a lot about the country. He's been in public service his whole life. I do think at some point that 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 Biden Ginsburg, right? 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?

• 32:58Ezra Klein?

  Uh, and people saw that coming. I was one of many people who wrote a piece saying Ruth Biden Ginsburg 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. Like 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 whom it is. If you think Kamala Harris cannot win, then you try to talk to her about that, right? Then like, I wouldn't want to do that conversation either if I was, but if that is what they believe, right? If the thing a lot of people think about them 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?

• 33:43Ezra Klein?

  Like, that to me is like the thing that keeps coming up. Like, is it actually okay if Donald Trump wins? If it is, fine. But if it's not, then what? Then you gotta do something.

• 33:54Ross Douthat?

  It's not just about Trump here, right? Like Ruth Biden Ginsburg staying on the court. Had Trump not won, or had she, you know, 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, you know, I mean, again, we've had this conversation about Trump so many times. Joe Biden is in charge of America's like 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, you know, the United States of America at a moment when a bunch of, you

• 34:39Ross Douthat?

  know, 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, right? Like, I'm sorry, if the choice is between the two men you saw on stage tonight, are you choosing Biden for that, guys?

• 34:58Ezra Klein?

  Between the two of them, yes, I would choose Biden for that. Absolutely. I mean, 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% tariff on everything plan is genuine lunacy.

• 35:29Ross Douthat?

  No, no, but wait a minute. Joe, Donald Trump's 10% tariff on everything plan is a bad idea. 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 than having-

• 35:52Ezra 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.

• 36:01Ross Douthat?

  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, you know, I just interviewed JD 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 there is a role that the presidency plays in the world system that depends on the guy being there. And I just think, I think we're in danger of understating the extent of the limitations that we saw in from Joe Biden tonight. That's all. And what it implies for, again, the sort of, the morality-

• 36:43Ross Douthat?

  Of putting him back in charge, independent of the question of like, how do you beat Trump?

• 36:49Speaker 01

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

• 36:55Ross Douthat?

  I mean, aren't you worried about that?

• 36:57Ezra 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 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.

• 37:16Ross Douthat?

  It's not that, but it's not, it's not not that completely.

• 37:20Ezra Klein?

  I think it is not, not that, but I, or whichever number of negatives I need. But, but I, look, I, 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. Like, I'm very clear on that. Look, the, the place where Democrats are paralyzed, in my view, is strategically, right? They don't, they're, they, they can't, 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.

• 38:01Ezra Klein?

  It's not like it was in the 60s where parties knew how to do this and had like a lot of muscle memory on it. And so I think, you know, if, if tomorrow, what is going to happen, or today, is that 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, is what do they do? And so I'll ask it of you two. I mean, 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?

• 38:38Ross Douthat?

  I've, I've ranted, I'll let Michelle handle that one.

• 38:40Speaker 01

  I think that they should have a plan in place before they get to the convention. I mean, they, if they, if they wanted to go down this road, they need to do a lot of legwork 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, like, leave it to God on convention week.

• 39:11Ross Douthat?

  I think that, of course, if you're running the convention, if you're running the DNC, you obviously want to have some kind of plan. But like, the worst-case scenario, say Biden does his duty, I think it is his duty, and stands aside. If he stands aside and endorses Harris, then it's just gonna be Harris, right? Say he stands aside and doesn't endorse Harris. Say you go to the convention and it's like the worst-case scenario and it's chaos and so on, right? Still, the endpoint there is one of two things happen. Either Harris emerges as the nominee, which is still probably the most likely scenario,

• 39:54Ross Douthat?

  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, right? Like, nobody likes the unknown, but it's not like Dean Phillips is gonna walk out of the convention as the nominee. It's either gonna be Harris-

• 40:17Speaker 01

  Is there somebody that you would feel comfortable with, Ross? I mean, obviously you-

• 40:20Ross Douthat?

  Me?

• 40:21Speaker 01

  And Ezra.

• 40:22Ross Douthat?

  I mean, first, again, I would feel more comfortable after tonight with Kamala Harris than with Joe Biden.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  But is that who you would feel most comfortable with?

• 40:33Ross Douthat?

  I mean, I don't, you know, I think Josh Shapiro is a fairly impressive guy among the Democrats. I mean, if you're asking me to just like randomly pick the Democratic nominee, sure, Josh Shapiro, how about that? I don't, I don't, yeah.

• 40:47Speaker 01

  Why don't you, Ezra?

• 40:48Ezra Klein?

  I think you actually have a, I did a great, I think, great episode with L.A. and K Mark 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. You can find it on the daily feed or on the interview feed, and I thought she performed well there. But I think you need to see people pushed, right? Which, again, if they did something in the next week, right? 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, and I have great faith in the Democratic Party, I have great faith in the many amazing people who've served in my administration, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg..."

• 41:35Ezra Klein?

  So on, and I'm gonna finish out my term and do the best I can on the crises I'm facing. And, you know, the Democratic Party is gonna pick a new candidate, I think we would see, right? And I think that it would be up to people to give speeches and, you know, 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, I want to at least take a minute and push the Biden apologist line here and see what you think of it. So if I'm- If you say that he had a cold, I'm gonna scream. If I'm a diehard Biden guy, here's what I would say. This was a bad night. If you

• 42:18Ezra Klein?

  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

• 42:59Ezra Klein?

  got kind of knocked back. But, you know, he is the incumbent. The economy is improving. He's gonna get better. This is gonna knock some clarity into him, I guess. And, you know, in the same way that people didn't completely lose their marbles after, you know, Obama had a bad debate and fell behind Romney in the polls, they shouldn't do that with Joe Biden now, that all this debate stuff is, as people always would say at me, Aaron Sorkin fanfiction. And that like, you know, the party's got Biden, they've got to figure out what to do with him. And that, you know, he can still have a big comeback at the second debate, which we're definitely gonna have, because, you know- Because Trump's gonna be up for that one. I think Trump 100% will be up for that one, actually. But, well, I would say 100%.

• 43:43Ezra Klein?

  I think he might. That's the Biden apologist line, I could imagine.

• 43:46Ross Douthat?

  You best, you best start believing in Aaron Sorkin fanfic, laddie, because you're living in it. Sorry.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  Oh, that got weird fast.

• 43:57Ross Douthat?

  The meme, the meme had to come out.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  I totally take your point Ezra. When everybody freaked out over Obama in the bad performance back then, I was like, oh, that's just like, that's a bit much. The problem is, I see it this time is that this so fits the narrative of Joe Biden is too old and unfit. I mean, 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. It's what makes me think this one will have more legs than usual.

• 44:40Ross Douthat?

  I mean, Obama lost a debate to Romney, like on points, right? 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, you know, Trump landed some punches and Biden, you know, Biden didn't, didn't exactly have a great response. We're talking, I mean, if you really wanted to push it, you could say, you know, it's Ronald Reagan in the first debate with Walter Mondale, right? Where Reagan seemed a little more out of it than Obama did, right? Like, I mean, if you really, if you want to stretch things.

• 45:24Ross Douthat?

  But, um, yeah, I mean, he's, Joe Biden is too old to be president.

• 45:32Speaker 01

  My last kind of thought is, do you really think any of this is going to happen? Like, I tend to think we can talk about this all night long. Ain't nothing big gonna shift. Like, the Biden people are not gonna, they're gonna come out, they're gonna say everybody's being too hysterical. These things don't matter. He's up for the job, blah, blah, blah, whatever.

• 45:55Ross 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.

• 46:06Ross Douthat?

  When he loses the media and the intelligentsia, no matter what his loyal staffers say. And my impression, it's 11:42 PM. I'm just, you know, watching TV and reading social media like the rest of you.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  You're just riffing.

• 46:19Ross 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.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  Ezra, give us some uplift. Oops, sorry.

• 46:31Ross Douthat?

  That's not, no, but wait, this is, I know we have to end. But if you want to be uplifted as a Democrat, isn't that, couldn't that be the good news? Right? 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.

• 46:51Ezra Klein?

  I don't make predictions. I'm not going to play this uplift or pessimism. The Democratic Party is going through, as we speak, a genuine panic. They were quite unnerved. As of last week, they are 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 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? Right? 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,

• 47:36Ezra Klein?

  this convergence through Klobuchar and Buttigieg endorsing him, this sort of movement of the party that makes a, that sends a very strong signal and helps Biden take the nomination when he was looking quite on the ropes. Like very shortly before that, it's easy to forget how bad he looked after Iowa, New Hampshire. And so now we're going to see, right? The Democratic Party, I don't believe, I don't believe if you, you gave all the, you know, top Democrats right now, truth serum or such a thing there. And you said, is Biden going to win? They would tell you yes. So now that that is like sitting there in their hearts, we will see, can they act in any kind of coordinated way to do something difficult, which is persuade this guy that he shouldn't run again

• 48:19Ezra Klein?

  and risk becoming the Ruth Biden Ginsburg of this election and destroying his legacy and handing this back to Donald Trump. Or can they 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 a politically tricky, but not the end of the world thing to have to to handle. 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, like, sometimes the vice president does not get the nomination.

• 49:04Ezra Klein?

  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, you know, we're going to see. Like, is the Democratic Party a party? Or is it just Joe Biden, just whoever's in charge at that moment?

• 49:21Speaker 01

  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.

• 49:29Ross Douthat?

  Yeah, Ezra, Ezra, this was great. You were fantastic.

• 49:31Speaker 01

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

• 49:33Ross Douthat?

  Yeah.

• 49:33Ezra Klein?

  I'm on the West Coast right now. This is easy for me.

• 49:36Speaker 01

  Oh, shut up. Never mind. I'm hanging up.

• 49:47Speaker 01

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