WASHINGTON — For nearly an hour Thursday night, President Joe Biden faced reporters and spooled out ideas shaped by a half-century in elected office.
He spoke about gun violence and taxes, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s economic leverage over Europe.
But at this perilous point in Biden’s candidacy, policy positions aren’t necessarily what his audience needed to hear.
As he struggles to recover from his debate performance last month, Biden is being judged less on the substance of his answers than on the style and clarity of his delivery.
Democratic leaders are considering whether to force him off the ticket. To stanch the rebellion, Biden, 81, needs to prove that he can speak in the crisp, confident tones that voters, or at least the members of his party, expect of a president.
The news conference, capping a three-day NATO summit in Washington, was a major test — the largest since the debate and perhaps the biggest until the Democratic presidential nominating convention next month, if Biden can persevere. There was no teleprompter to guide him through the inquiry, no pre-approved questions that had been slipped to reporters.
By no means was this is a disastrous showing on a par with the debate. But it wasn’t a bravura performance bound to quell doubts about his fitness once and for all.
“It may be too little, too late,” said a Democratic congressman, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Biden misspoke just minutes into his first answer, referring to Vice President Kamala Harris as “Vice President Trump.”
Donald Trump quickly pounced on the gaffe, mocking Biden on his social media site: “Great job, Joe.”
A similar slip-up had come just hours earlier. Introducing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the summit, Biden erroneously called him “President Putin.”
There were audible gasps in the audience, and when he realized the mistake, Biden quickly corrected himself.
“When in the same day you refer to your VP as ‘Vice President Trump’ and Zelenskyy as Putin, you are doomed,” a Democratic strategist told NBC News.
Two weeks after a debate at which he struggled to finish a sentence or complete a thought, Biden has little room for error. Any flub is bound to be magnified and seen as evidence of infirmity.
“That was not as appallingly bad as the debate, but it was also not exactly reassuring,” said Rosa Brooks, a senior Defense Department official in the Obama administration and now a Georgetown Law School professor. “He was clearly working very, very hard to hold on to each chain of thought and not always succeeding.”
Biden’s aides were cheered by his performance. They believe he showed a command of policy that Trump could never hope to match.
Andrew Bates, a White House press spokesman, wrote on social media: “To answer the question on everyone’s mind: No, Joe Biden does not have a doctorate in foreign affairs. He’s just that f—— good.”
Biden’s dilemma is that with so much attention focused on his syntax, he can’t effectively draw distinctions with Trump. He tried his best at the news conference. European leaders, he said, are telling him, “You’ve got to win. He [Trump] would be a disaster.”
Another test comes Monday, when Biden will sit for an interview with NBC News’ Lester Holt. Until then, he will need to stave off mass defections from fellow Democrats who would prefer to see a younger candidate, perhaps Harris, atop the ticket.
The end of the NATO summit could open the floodgates for those Democrats who didn’t want to be seen as bailing on the president in front of dozens of other allied leaders.
A fresh defection came even as the summit wound down.
Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., issued a statement calling on Biden to step aside minutes after the news conference concluded.
Biden, he wrote, “must make way for a new generation of leaders.”
Peter Nicholas
Peter Nicholas is a senior White House reporter for NBC News.
Megan Lebowitz
Megan Lebowitz is a politics reporter for NBC News.
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