Who would have expected that Joe Biden would be looking to MAGA World to save his re-election campaign against Donald Trump?
Alas, that is essentially how Biden is hoping to dance through disaster, banking on a televised interview with NBC’s Lester Holt on the opening night of next week’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee to deflect attention away from his slow-motion political collapse.
“If that goes well,” one Democratic strategist told the Daily Beast, “then the RNC does present the campaign with an opportunity to move things along.”
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Of course, an interview going well is no guarantee these days for the president.
Following his disastrous performance at the June 27 debate against Trump, Biden tried to assuage concerns about his fitness for office by sitting for an interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News. During the 22-minute sit-down, Biden gave stammering and meandering answers that did little to reassure a growing legion of skeptics—among them, as fate would have it, Stephanopoulos himself, who was caught on camera in Manhattan a few days later telling a passerby he didn’t think Biden could serve four more years.
A second official, one familiar with the campaign’s thinking, said if Biden can hold his own against Holt, as he mostly did during a Thursday night press conference that lasted nearly an hour, then voters may be sufficiently reassured to remember that Biden’s age is not the only issue they will have to consider in November.
“The RNC is a real opportunity for us to drive home the stakes of this election,” the official said.
The GOP convention is set to commence in Milwaukee on Monday and culminate on Thursday with a speech by its presumptive nominee. By then, Democratic delegates will have just a month before their own party’s convention is set to begin on Aug. 19 in Chicago, where it remains to be seen whether Biden will become the official Democratic nominee for president.
First he has to make it through the next several days without giving Democrats several more reasons to demand he abandon his candidacy for a second term.
Although his performance Thursday night during a live press conference at the close of the NATO summit in Washington was far from dismal, he did conflate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin at a NATO event earlier in the day; then during the press conference, he called Trump his vice president.
Since the debate, Trump has been curiously disciplined, mostly watching the media feeding frenzy in Washington from afar. Nobody likes ratings like Trump does, but if the drama surrounding Biden’s floundering candidacy overshadows the RNC, the world’s most notorious attention hog might just let it go. After all, the disaster movie that has unfurled in Washington since Biden’s debate performance in Atlanta has turned out to be the summer blockbuster nobody expected.
Conservatives remain astonished to find not only the media but many Democrats doing their work for them.
“Joe Biden has serious health issues, and Democrats are finally learning there’s more to being President than bike rides, ice cream cones, and long walks on the beach in Delaware,” Republican strategist Jahan Wilcox told the Daily Beast. “Republicans don’t need to do anything” to remind Americans that Biden is not “remotely fit to serve until January 2029.”
Biden will seek to prove otherwise. Ironically, he’ll be interviewed by NBC’s Holt at the LBJ Library in Austin, which Biden campaign aides hope will remind voters that Biden has championed civil rights initiatives, albeit on a smaller scale than Johnson did in the 1960’s.
But there’s a risk the venue choice could backfire and serve as a reminder that Johnson, battered by the disaster of the Vietnam War, voluntarily bowed out of the 1968 race, a move many Democrats argue Biden should emulate.
The convention that year, like the convention slated for August, took place in Chicago.
