In sharp contrast to Ezra Klein’s slippery, dissembling spin-fest regarding President Biden’s decline, statistics maven Nate Silver has gifted us with a far more fair, responsible and honest—that is, ethical— analysis on his substack newsletter, “The Silver Bulletin.” (Nate has 45,000 paying subscribers while I have trouble getting more than a few hundred people to read my free blog every day, so attention must be paid.) Nate’s leftward bias crept out into the light periodically even when he was primarily a sports analyst, but to his great credit, he tries to conquer his biases, which is all any of us can do.
His is a sharp analysis for the most part, and a bracing nostrum from all the “it isn’t what it is” Democrats and media pundits who expect us to believe that old Joe is in tip-top shape. Silver writes,
The first time my internal needle began to shift was in late summer, when Biden’s approval numbers remained poor even as the economy was improving and it was becoming more apparent that his advanced age — Biden turned 81 in November (Trump is 77) — was an enormous problem for voters and one that Democrats weren’t going to be able to spin away. Still, as of late September, I thought that (i) it had become too late for a full-fledged primary challenge to Biden, and (ii) Biden voluntarily announcing that he wouldn’t run for a second term was a close call but probably failed a cost-benefit test for Democrats.
That’s Nate at his best: he’s basing his analysis on what he thinks will make statistical sense, not what he personally wants to happen. More…
If you’re someone who would rather not see Trump re-elected again or who cares about the election for other reasons, it’s time to face the facts. You need to adjust to the new reality and not be mired in anchoring bias by your previous impression of the race….even the most optimistic Democrats, if you read between the lines, are really arguing that Democrats could win despite Biden and not because of him. Biden is probably a below-replacement-level candidate at this point because Americans have a lot of extremely rational concerns about the prospect of a Commander-in-Chief who would be 86 years old by the end of his second term. It is entirely reasonable to see this as disqualifying. The fact that Trump also has a number of disqualifying features is not a good reason to nominate Biden. It is a reason for Democrats to be the adults in the room and acknowledge that someone who can’t sit through a Super Bowl interview isn’t someone the public can trust to have the physical and mental stamina to handle an international crisis, terrorist attack or some other unforseen threat when he’ll be in his mid-80s.
Well, bingo. And I appreciate Nate using the “replacement level” analogy, which is right out of baseball sabermetrics. “Replacement level” is the basic, minimally qualified generic individual who could handle a role sufficiently to get by. Gerald Ford was a replacement level President. Warren G. Harding. Benjamin Harrison.
The problem is that Silver’s recommendation for Biden’s best strategy to deal with this crisis is fanciful. He says, as Ezra Klein did but without Klein’s desperate spin, that “the only option now is for Biden to step aside, perhaps in response to peer pressure from Democratic leaders and people inside the White House.” (It really bothers me that Silver extensively quotes Klein in his desperately dishonest argument I examined here.) But acknowledging that he might be wrong about Joe (that level of humility is itself admirable), Nate writes,
…But if we’re wrong about this, it ought to be easy to prove it.
Here’s what I’d propose. Over the course of the next several weeks, Biden should do four lengthy sitdown interviews with “non-friendly” sources. “Non-friendly” doesn’t mean hostile: nonpartisan reporters with a track record of asking tough questions would work great. A complete recording of the interviews should be made public. The interviews ought to include a mix of different media (e.g. television and print) and journalistic perspectives. For instance, Biden could pick these four:
A lengthy sitdown interview with the Washington bureaus of the New York Times or Washington Post.
An interview with 60 Minutes, making up for the interview Biden ought to have done with CBS during the Super Bowl.
An interview with some sort of center-right print or digital outlet. This could be say the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, or even a team of writers at The Dispatch.
Wild card. Take your pick. Bonus points for Fox News, though I doubt Biden would do it. Go on Ezra Klein’s podcast? Go on Rogan? Just kidding, I think. But Bernie Sanders did it.
This really isn’t too much to ask.
A couple of observations on this: Silver’s biases are creeping out again if he can call the Post or the Times “non-friendly” to any Democrat, especially when both papers have made it clear that defeating Trump is one of their missions. “60 Minutes” interviews with Biden in the past have featured softball toss after softball toss. I would want to see Biden deal with an interview like literally every interview Donald Trump has faced when not appearing on Fox News. Furthermore, Silver’s solution is too much to ask, and I assume Silver knows it. Biden won’t do such interviews, friendly or not, because he can’t do them, and the more time that passes the less able to do them he will be. I find it disingenuous of Silver to suggest an impossible course of action. It feels like a delaying tactic on his part: he, or perhaps those he regards as his audience, aren’t ready to give up on Biden yet, because the implications of that are dire. He ends by writing,
If Biden was willing to take five hours to speak with [Special Counsel]Hur, he ought to to take five hours for this. And if he can’t, it’s awfully audacious to ask Americans to make him president for another four years.
That, however, seems to be exactly what Biden and his party are determined to do.
Ethics Alarms 
Why does he dismiss Joe Rogan? If you really want a moderate Democrat who might actually ask fair questions, Rogan would work a lot better than any mainstream source. I would like to call Klein out on his ‘recorded’ aspect. What is wrong with live? Why would you record something like this if you wanted to prove that he was capable? Live would be the only way to go.
Exactly. ”Recorded” usually translates directly to “edited”. If it’s recorded, the interviewer gets to at least audibly record it himself/herself on a separate device for corroboration.
President Biden would never go on Fox News, but Rogan’s a pretty solid runner up. The fact of the matter is that the President can’t really do extemporaneous full-length interviews any longer because he can’t string cogent thoughts together for any serious length of time.
Those wanting to compare Biden to Reagan’s decline should probably go look at President Reagan’s speech at the ’92 Republican convention, four years after he left office. You could tell he wasn’t at the top of the his game any longer, but put that speech up against anything Biden has done in the last year…the last two years. Compared to President Biden – to continue the baseball motif – Reagan was Babe Ruth in his later carerr, still crushing belt-high fastballs.
ugh…”career”…
Sorry, I meant Silver, not Klein.
I don’t understand the issue about his age. Biden’s age is only related to his cognitive abilities. If his cognitive ability were equal to Trumps we would not be evaluating him on his age.
Why doesn’t Silver and the other pundits realize that his age is secondary to his abject failure policy wise. Our borders are porous, he takes every opportunity to denigrate those that disagree with him, his economic policy was to spend money like a drunken sailor. Anyone can do that. Stimulating economic growth is about giving businesses a reason to invest. Sure spending gobs of money that cause prices to rise at the retail level before wholesale prices rise will inflate profits which leads to more investment but those profits are transitory and to maintain them retail prices must continue to rise faster than costs. Unfortunately, once households start feeling the pinch they demand more money from employers.
Biden, like so many others, use nominal wage increases to show how well they did. Because most college students found their Econ courses boring or confusing they never learned that I’d the price level rises 8 % and you got a massive 6% raise you just got screwed yet they believe that wage increase was a good thing. I wonder how many people would trade the average salary of today for the average salary of 1960 if they also got the 1960 price level. I would.
Biden’s age is only relevant insofar as we really do not know who is making decisions. We just believe that it is not the guy who was on the ballot.
“The first time my internal needle began to shift was in late summer, when Biden’s approval numbers remained poor even as the economy was improving”
This is the kind of thing that people who don’t worry about how their bills are going to get paid say… I don’t think that anyone is really excited about their economic outlook, prices certainly haven’t fallen, wages haven’t increased in lock-step. But stock-line-go-up, and unemployment-rate-go-down! Missing the real point entirely: Foreclosure rates are at a generational high, food bank usage has quadrupled, and personal debt has never been higher in the history of ever. If the economy has actually improving, as opposed to ostensibly improving, people might still be willing to vote for a barely sentient fossil, they did only three years ago! But there’s an air that this election actually matters, that issues that actually effect people need to be addressed, as opposed to three years ago where a machine that a) wasn’t Trump and b) converts oxygen to carbon dioxide filled all the requirements people had of the office.
Silver famously misses the forest for the trees.
Well said HT
Relying on statistics will do that. My favorite stat-nerd, Bill James, once wrote that clutch hitting in baseball was a myth because statistics didn’t show that the skill exists.That was in direct opposition to observable facts,and eventually Bill agreed that there were players who in fact did perform especially well under pressure, and others that “choked.” Now he’s finding tools to measure the skill.
One thing I agree with Silver about, is that their best option at this point is to make it at least look like Biden is stepping aside voluntarily. They get to maintain the charade that he’s mentally sound, instead trying to sell the idea that while he could do the job, he no longer wishes to.
What are their alternatives?
1) Continue pretending that he’s “sharp”, as the current Regime Media stylebook requires. The party True Believers will believe that a turnip is a toaster oven, if the approved Party mouthpieces agree about it, but there aren’t enough of those to win an election. Even firmly liberal voters like Silver are starting to voice doubts about that message.
2) Turn on Biden no later than the party convention and force him out of the 2024 race, but not out of the White House. This is horrible for then politically. It basically admits they were lying about Biden all along. It hangs a lame-duck President that nobody wants around their neck like an albatross in the run-up to an election.
3. Turn on Biden as with (2), but force him out of the White House as well. This has pretty much all the problems of (2), but with a different twist. Nobody ever wanted Kamala Harris as President. On the upside for the Dems, they could boast of installing the First Female President. On the downside, she would be a disaster. She can’t speak, she’s not popular, and they’d be forced to run her as their candidate.