What Was Biden Doing at Camp David the Week Before the Debate?

Reportedly, President Biden was at the presidential retreat to get ready for the debate against former President Donald Trump. One has trouble imagining what Thursday evening's debate would have been without the considerable time and solitude President Biden was accorded to prepare for the faceoff with Trump. Everyone knows Biden's debate performance couldn't have been worse. He instilled no confidence. None. As Bess Levin wrote in Vanity Fair the morning after, "Joe Biden's debate performance was objectively terrible."

By the time this column appears Sunday morning, everything there is to say about the debate will have been said. So, let's focus on the likely alternatives facing the Democratic Party. The most likely, of course, is that no challenge to Biden's nomination is mounted, and he and Trump will square off in November. It's too early to predict how that would turn out, but there will be a lot of Democratic nail-biting while the Party waits to find out. I do not believe the subsequent debate in September will have much impact on the election. A home run would be that Biden makes no mistakes at the next debate, but I don't believe he can be inspiring. I suspect Trump's sentencing in New York next month for cooking the books to hide his payoff to a porn star will have little additional impact on the race.

So, What Are the Alternatives?

An alternative, of course, is that one or more Democrats mount a floor fight at the nominating convention or announce ahead of time that they plan to contest the nomination. Now, I suspect that a serious threat to do that could force Biden to rethink whether he wants to be responsible for a convention floor fight. It is a rather farfetched idea, and it would be messy. I don't envision a convention floor fight happening, but here's how it would work.

While Biden now has nearly 4,000 delegates in his pocket, having dominated the Democratic primary process, the party rules do not require those delegates to vote for him even though they are pledged to him. Yes, the rules allow the delegates who are pledged to President Biden at the Democratic convention to change their minds and to vote their conscience. If there appeared to be a revolt brewing among delegates, there could be a free-for-all at the convention. If this seemed a severe threat, Biden could release his delegates to vote their conscience in the interest of unity.

Throwing the convention open to alternate nominations is not likely, but it has happened in the past and could happen again. Jimmy Carter defeated Ted Kennedy in a contested Democratic convention in 1980, just as Gerald Ford beat out Ronald Reagan at the Republican convention in 1976.

If polls suggest Biden's support among the electorate is hemorrhaging, convention delegates, including those pledged but not really "committed" to him, could force an open vote on the convention floor, and delegates could rally around another candidate. Likely? Perhaps not. Possible? Definitely.

The delegates, at least most of them, will not go down with the ship if they are convinced Biden's candidacy has become a lost cause. Trump would have trouble beating an energetic, younger, savvy Democratic opponent. The convention rules do not absolutely bind the delegates to Biden, and nominating conventions can take on their own life. Another abysmal performance by Biden between now and August 19^th, when the Democrats convene for their nominating convention in Chicago, and all bets could be off. Biden could call for an open convention if the polls show a disaster unfolding for the Democrats. Everyone knows that Trump is beatable. Only a weak democratic contender would lose to him. The Democratic rank and file could balk rather than serve up a weak candidate to face a very beatable Republican opponent such as Donald Trump.

This week's debate may not have been fatal to Biden, but he did himself no good. And if President Biden's performance wasn't deadly, it wasn't much of a rallying cry either. A sharp democratic contender would have eviscerated Trump. Trump's performance was loaded with inaccuracies and a few Trumpian gargantuan falsehoods, but all anyone will remember or talk about is Biden's pathetically weak performance. Consequently, Trump has come out of the debate with the wind to his back. While Trump is far from the nation's most popular politician, all the talk following the debate was how horribly Biden performed. The debate almost made Trump look presidential by contrast to Biden.

Polls showed a whopping 67% of debate watchers agreed that Trump had won the debate. That is a seismic verdict, given how ridiculous some of Trump's comments were. I suspect Trump's edge was even more remarkable, but some respondents simply couldn't bring themselves to give the nod to the former President. It is not so much that Trump overperformed as it was the extent of Biden's underperformance. I have watched every presidential debate since the Kennedy-Nixon debates sixty-four years ago, and there were none in which a presidential candidate performed so poorly as Biden performed this week. Trump was polling ahead of Biden before the debate, and it is hard to see how Biden can regain much momentum in the one additional debate that will take place in September.

Of concern to Biden supporters is how much his performance has diminished since the 2020 presidential debates when a clear majority of debate watchers said Biden handily beat Trump. Few are confident that Biden can repeat that performance. Biden's capacity to inspire the electorate has been seriously diminished. The Republicans smell blood in the water. It's going to get ugly. The Democrats can do better, but they have no time to dally.

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