Gordon: Yeah, Ezra, you threw a bit of a grenade into the world, and now it is time to take a little bit of fire. And our first question is from MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes.
Voice-mail recording: I mean, I think a lot of people share this acute sense of Biden’s campaigning ability, like his candidate quality, to be significantly diminished, even if they think he’s not diminished in the actual office. But my big question about all of these scenarios — and there’s been many about Biden not, you know, being the nominee — is: It seems like there’s one person who gets to decide if Joe Biden is going to run for president again, and that’s Joe Biden. And I can’t imagine a scenario in which he decides that, absent some medical situation that happens. So I can’t get past that first step, so I’m just curious how you think about it.
Klein: Thank you, Chris. So one way to say what I’m saying in that audio essay is, I’m making a prediction about the campaign. I am saying that if you look at where Joe Biden is now, he’s losing. He’s losing in the polls, and typically, Donald Trump overperforms his polling, so that’s a pretty dangerous place for Biden to be. And his early speeches are not looking great to me. His performance in press conferences has been, like, frankly, disastrous. He skipped the Super Bowl interview. I am not seeing a kind of energy and aggression in that campaign that makes it look to me like Biden is going to be able to close the gap. So that’s my concern.
One thing that could happen is I could just be proven completely wrong. Maybe Biden shakes off the campaigning cobwebs, gets out there, gives a fiery State of the Union, gives really strong speeches, gives more interviews, gives strong pressers. Maybe he climbs a bit in the polls, the paid media advertising campaign begins to look really good, and I come to look really alarmist, my audio essay looks ridiculous, Joe Biden wins by five, and everybody says I’m an idiot. And, like, that would be totally fine. That would be a great outcome to this.
But it could go the other way, too. Over the next three or four months, Joe Biden could look worse. He could freeze out on the campaign trail in a significant way or have some moment that reads to people like really profound confusion. He could be, in an effort to keep that from happening, kept in even more of a bubble by his staff. The State of the Union could go poorly or just be very low energy or something. He could give interviews that go badly — right? — could sit for some things, and it just goes disastrously.