‘Totally different’: Biden’s biographers and defenders reckon with the debate

Why did anyone think Joe Biden was ready for a 90-minute presidential debate? One reason is that a small handful of journalists, with left-leaning sympathies but very credible records, have interviewed him and those close to him in the White House and returned with reports that while he’s definitely older, he’s still pretty sharp and in charge.

Two of the most prominent are Biden biographers Evan Osnos and Franklin Foer. I spoke to them Sunday as they reconciled their own portrayals with the faltering 81-year-old they saw on national television.

In his deeply-reported recent New Yorker article, Osnos detailed Biden on the precipice of his final campaign, the definition of an elder statesman steeling himself for a rematch with an emboldened Donald Trump. But in his one sitdown with Biden in January (the White House declined his invitation for a second), he described an older Biden in command of his faculties: “His voice is thin and clotted, and his gestures have slowed, but, in our conversation, his mind seemed unchanged. He never bungled a name or a date.”

“The Biden I spoke with in January was very different from the Biden we saw on that stage Thursday night,” Osnos said Sunday.

Osnos said that following Thursday’s contest, he’d concluded that Biden “clearly has good days and bad days and wretched days. What we saw was not the kind of performance that anyone would want from a candidate.”

And he said he made no apologies for his journalism. For that New Yorker piece, he’d spoken at length with Biden advisers and confidantes who raved about his ability to do the job despite his age. “I don’t think I would do anything differently,” Osnos said.

Foer had also defended Biden’s mental acuity since publishing his book on the president, The Last Politician, last year. He told podcast host Kara Swisher in September that the real problem was not Biden’s age, but the media’s false equivalence between that and the dangers of a second Trump presidency.

“His inability to finish a sentence, or the fact that his stories occasionally trail off, is now on a continuum with Trump being a lunatic. And this is in part something that they need to combat,” Foer said at the time. “It’s also a media failing as well, that there’s just an inability to talk about the relative problems that these two senior citizens have, which I think are not the same in kind, and they’re being smushed together.”

“If you gave him the type of mental acuity test that Nikki Haley talks about giving him, he would pass that,” he said.

But in an Atlantic piece published on Friday, Foer compared the decision for Biden to step down to his family’s attempts to take the car keys away from his aging grandfather when he got older. In a brief note to Semafor over the weekend, he said that since publishing his book last September, he had changed his mind about the president.

“I still think he has the acuity to do the job,” he said. But, he added, “I do feel differently.”

The mainstream press’s shakiness on Biden, even among the journalists his campaign considers to be the most friendly, is another indication of the tectonic shift in the press corps about the coverage of Biden’s age.

The Biden White House and campaign communications team have spent the last several years scolding the press and deflecting questions about Biden’s age, dismissing them as a media fixation disproportionate to the threat to democracy posed by Trump and his lies about the results of the 2020 election, among other things. They mocked reporters for covering the shoes that Biden was wearing to avoid tripping, and the fact that he’d started walking surrounded by a phalanx of aides to combat the viral videos of him shuffling to Air Force One on the White House lawn.

Clips of Biden seeming old were cast as out-of-context or the product of partisan misinformation. Biden’s refusal to give interviews was described as an innovative press strategy aimed at prioritizing speaking to the influencers and nontraditional media figures Americans are actually paying attention to. When Biden skipped the traditional Super Bowl interview for the second year in a row, the White House said it wasn’t so he could avoid the press. It was so that Americans could enjoy a day of football free of politics.

Biden’s poor moments in private became Republican attacks. When special counsel Robert Hur released a report describing Biden as a “sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory,” the White House penned and boosted a letter it wrote to the White House Correspondents Association describing Hur’s comments as “wrong and inappropriate.”

“Those facts stress the importance of careful, patient coverage,” White House counsel spokesperson Ian Sams wrote. “Instead, many outlets have reported striking inaccuracies that misrepresent the report’s conclusion about the President, and reporters in the White House Briefing Room have asked questions that include false content or are based on false premises.”

The White House press corps can’t totally be blamed for its struggle to cover questions about Biden’s age. The stringent rules of traditional, serious mainstream journalism — the kind that helps one earn a coveted seat in the White House briefing room — frowns upon extrapolating a politician’s motivation or mental state. (Think of how many news organizations initially struggled to describe Trump’s lies as “lies.”)

It isn’t really that journalists didn’t ask questions about Biden’s age so much as the daily press coverage in general did not convey his condition.

Those stories were left on the table: In the days since the debate, The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times have both reported about foreign leaders expressing concerns about recent meetings with the president.

I also missed this story. I wrote a newsletter about Biden for a little less than a year for Politico. While we included items and tidbits about Biden’s age and the White House’s attempts to shield him from the press, my own coverage did not have any particular emphasis on how Biden’s age was impacting the presidency.

But if age wasn’t top-of-mind for members of the White House press corps before, it is now, and many journalists will be eager to prove they weren’t complicit in turning a blind eye to the president’s mental slip-ups.

For those in the media who’d faced criticism from the president and his allies over age-specific coverage of the candidate, his debate performance was no surprise.

Just a few weeks ago, the Journal was the subject of criticism by numerous high-ranking Democrats and the White House over reporting that people — many of them Republicans — who had met Biden privately said he was mentally “slipping.” On Thursday, I asked Journal editor-in-chief Emma Tucker whether she felt vindicated.

“Very much so,” she said in an email. “The reporters took a lot of grief for covering a story that needed to be covered and that no other main stream publishers were willing to touch. I am very proud of them.”

Biden won’t get an easier go from liberal allies in the media, either. The debate hadn’t even concluded when left-leaning analysts and commentators were publicly calling for him to step aside. The New York Times’ editorial board, New Yorker editor David Remnick, and CNN’s Van Jones have all called on Democrats to find another nominee. Joe Scarborough, the Morning Joe host, who I reported in 2022 has been one of the most important media figures in Biden’s orbit, said during his broadcast Friday morning that Biden should consider stepping aside (though he took to Twitter later to clarify that his wife and co-host Mika Brzezinski believed that Biden should stay in the race).

The National Review compared the media response to Biden’s performance to hand-wringing over reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop. “Now, with a growing body of footage making plain the loss of pep in President Joe Biden’s step, major media insist once again that you look the other way.”