Politics

President Biden’s failure to speak clearly in the unscripted setting of a presidential debate late last month plunged his party — and his re-election campaign — into crisis.

He’s hoping an unscripted appearance at the NATO summit in Washington tomorrow will help him turn things around.

The political drama over the past two weeks has turned in part on Biden’s fundamental struggle, in a moment that really counted, to send a message that could be widely understood. His effort to clean up the mess with an interview late last week created new questions about his communication skills, some of which were as absurd as the matter of whether he said “goodest” or “good as” when neither option really made sense.

It all underscores the fact that a president who for decades has delighted in the power — and the abundance — of his own speech has become, in certain moments, just plain hard to understand. Does it matter that the public can find itself turning up the volume or parsing the sometimes-corrected transcript to figure out what he meant?

“He’s become someone who, unless he’s giving a major speech, you have to lean forward to hear what he’s saying and sometimes you have to think twice to understand what he’s saying,” said David Kusnet, a former speechwriter for President Clinton who has observed Biden’s speeches for decades.

In scripted appearances or when he can rely on notes, the president typically has an easier time making a strong point — such as the unequivocal assurance he has made this week that he has no plans to bow out of the presidential race. His first solo news conference since the debate, scheduled for tomorrow evening, will amount to a critical opportunity for him to show his party that he can still be understood when speaking off the cuff.

But, in a development that has heightened the stakes of that appearance, Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker and a party leader who tends to speak very intentionally, decided on Wednesday to send a political message of her own.

“It’s up to the president to decide if he is going to run,” she said on MSNBC. “We’re all encouraging him to, to make that decision. Because time is running short.”

A history of presidents who weren’t soaring orators

Speaking clearly at all times has not historically been a requirement of the presidential job description.

George W. Bush famously spoke of being “misunderestimated” and asked grammatically incorrect questions like, “Is our children learning?”

Toward the end of his term, Ronald Reagan gave news conferences that frequently required immediate cleanup from his aides.

And Dwight Eisenhower’s low-key speaking style helped him work deftly behind the scenes in what has been called the “hidden-hand presidency.”

“They didn’t always find the right words to express themselves,” said Jeffrey Berry, an emeritus professor at Tufts University who studies the presidency, considering the underwhelming oratory of both Presidents Bush as well as Gerald Ford. “It didn’t seriously damage their presidencies, but ground against them day to day.”

Biden overcame a childhood stutter to become a frequent and fervid public speaker. As a senator and presidential candidate in the 1980s, he cast himself as a dynamic and inspiring speaker in the mold of the Kennedy family, and was a Senate committee chair reeling off pointed questions on Capitol Hill. As vice president, he offered a folksy foil to President Barack Obama’s soaring oratory. Some of Biden’s most memorable lines in those days came off the cuff, like the indelible and profane remark about just how big a deal the Affordable Care Act was.

But as president, Biden, who spent decades delighting in the extemporaneous, has struggled more off script. The White House has drawn attention for correcting some transcripts of his remarks, and he has made numerous verbal gaffes — like when, in a news conference held to assuage concerns about his age and memory in February, he mixed up Egypt and Mexico.

“He’s often searching for a word. He has more than a few malapropisms and descriptions that defy logical explanation,” Berry said.

Biden and his allies have downplayed those mistakes. They say they don’t matter nearly as much as Biden’s willingness to defend democracy against what he sees as an existential threat from former President Donald Trump.

“As someone who has been involved in two campaigns (now a third) to defeat Trump, it takes the right candidate to get that done,” Ron Klain, Biden’s former White House chief of staff, wrote in a post on X this week. “Pundits have always bet on verbally gifted opponents — Ds and Rs — who have lost to him.” He added: “Only one person has beaten him.”

Facing the dangerous rhetoric of Trump

President Biden’s Republican opponent rarely displays florid oratory or logical sense. A Trump speech is a blizzard of lies, insults and improvised gags, as well as callous disregard for institutions like the Justice Department or democracy itself.

“Everybody has a water spot, where water comes out,” Trump said on Tuesday night during his rally in Florida, seemingly referring to the stations where water was available to rallygoers braving the Miami heat. He has appeared to freeze onstage, including during a speech in May that he claims was an intentional pause. He has gone on nonsensical rants about whether it would be better to be electrocuted or attacked by a shark . And reporters who covered his administration know that he spoke in rambling and incoherent sentences that were difficult to quote.

Still, he finds ways to get his point across. Trump’s campaign rallies are energetic and he uses phrases like “dictator for one day” that, as foreboding as many voters find them, are unmistakably clear.

That is part of why Democrats are so worried about the possibility that Biden’s struggle to communicate on the debate stage could have permanently damaged his electability. And that may be why, on Wednesday morning, Pelosi seemingly sought to send the message that the future of Biden’s candidacy remains up for discussion.

She urged Biden to decide whether or not he plans to run, even though he says he has. And while she said she would support whatever he decides to do, her words seemed carefully designed to suggest to her party that the matter is not yet settled.

But even that message had to be clarified. She later insisted that she was not calling on Biden to “reconsider” his decision, and said that the president was “great.”

Skeptical Democrats shift to a different question: Can Biden actually win?

The number of elected officials publicly calling for Biden to bow out of the presidential race comprises 10 congressional Democrats — a narrow slice of the legislative branch that reflects just how reluctant Democrats are to weaken a nominee who says he wants to stay in the campaign.

But a growing chorus of Democrats is seizing on a different refrain: Let’s look at the math.

These senators and members of Congress are stopping short of actually calling for Biden to step aside, but their decision to suggest that he is on track to lose — and to drag the rest of the party down with him — speaks to the depth of their discontent.

“An unsentimental analysis of the cold hard numbers — which have no personal feelings or political loyalties — should inform what we decide and whom we nominate,” Representative Ritchie Torres, a Democrat from New York, wrote on X on Wednesday. He called on his party to consider the down-ballot effects of Biden’s candidacy.

To be sure, early indications don’t show a major down-ballot shift, as my colleague Jonathan Weisman reported today. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report yesterday moved six states toward Trump in its presidential predictions, including two with significant House and Senate races. But it did not shift any congressional races toward Republicans.

My colleague Michael Bender reported today that Democrats were warning about Biden’s chances behind closed doors, too.

“Right now, President Biden is behind Trump in all of our polling, and this Senate race is in a dead heat,” Representative Elissa Slotkin, who is running for Senate in Michigan, privately told donors.

But more damaging to Biden is what lawmakers are saying in public.

“Donald Trump is on track, I think, to win this election, and maybe win it by a landslide and take with him the Senate and the House,” Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado told CNN yesterday.

Three of Biden’s top aides will almost certainly have to answer lawmakers’ questions about the president’s viability when they speak with senators tomorrow in an effort to steady his candidacy.

Vice President Kamala Harris stepped up her attacks on former President Donald J. Trump on Wednesday as she said in Dallas that Mr. Trump would round up his political enemies, deport peaceful protesters and terminate the Constitution in a second term.

“Consider: Donald Trump has openly vowed if re-elected he’ll be a dictator on day one, that he will weaponize the Department of Justice against his political enemies, round up peaceful protesters and throw them out of our country and even, and even and I quote, ‘terminate’ the United States Constitution,” Ms. Harris said.

Ms. Harris has been harshly critical of Mr. Trump in the past, but at campaign events in the last two days, as an increasing number of Democrats question whether President Biden has the ability to beat Mr. Trump in November and the acuity to serve another four years, she has been far more explicit about the dangers she sees in a Trump second term. Ms. Harris has emerged as a top replacement for Mr. Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket should he drop out of the race.

In Dallas, Ms. Harris tried to attach Mr. Trump to Project 2025, a policy and staffing blueprint assembled by dozens of conservative groups for the next Republican administration. Among the platform proposals include replacing many federal civil servant jobs with political appointees who would be loyal to the president.

Ms. Harris accused Mr. Trump of adopting the project, which would shrink the Department of Education and cut programs like Head Start, the federal program for preschool children from low-income families.

“Let us be clear, this represents an outright attack on our children, our families and our future,” Ms. Harris told roughly 20,000 people at an event for Alpha Kappa Alpha, a historically Black sorority of which Ms. Harris is a member.

Project 2025, which is led by the conservative Heritage Foundation, is not Mr. Trump’s official campaign platform, and the former president has recently sought to distance himself from it. But the plans were developed by some of Mr. Trump’s former advisers who are likely to be involved in a potential second term, and many of the policies in Project 2025 mirror Mr. Trump’s official platform, Agenda 47.

In a statement, Danielle Alvarez, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, accused “Team Biden” of “fear-mongering because they have NOTHING else to offer the American people.”

With Mr. Biden mired in controversy after his disastrous debate performance two weeks ago, Mr. Trump has increasingly taken aim at Ms. Harris. Mr. Trump has dubbed her “Laffin’ Kamala Harris” and intentionally mispronounces her name at campaign events. Ms. Harris’s recent sharp rebukes of Mr. Trump come to the relief of many Democrats who felt she was too cautious and scripted when she first came to the White House.

But while political momentum is building for Ms. Harris, she is also navigating a difficult balancing act in not spotlighting the messaging limitations of her boss.

On Wednesday in Dallas, the crowd gasped when Ms. Harris first mentioned Mr. Trump’s name about midway through her speech. She noted that he had appointed three justices to the Supreme Court who joined the majority in overturning Roe v. Wade.

Sonia Southerland, a 69-year-old member of the sorority, said she was struck by how Ms. Harris explained the stakes of the election, specifically his potential plans for a second term.

“We can take that message back to our communities,” Ms. Southerland said, “back to our families, back to our big and little girls, and help them to understand what is happening in this country at this moment.”