There is No Litmus Test that Biden Will Pass

All parties to this controversy have no incentive to declare a passing grade

Joe Biden has scheduled a press conference for 6:30 PM EST this evening (Thurs. July 11). This should quell the demands that he does unscripted press conferences then, right? No.

Biden has been campaigning and publicly speaking an inordinate amount since Debategate, all while media pundits and detractors have been insisting that he needs to campaign and speak publicly an inordinate amount to convince skeptics that he is up to the challenge of campaigning and speaking publicly an inordinate amount in order to beat Donald Trump.

Do you see what I did there? It was a layered, circular statement that in reality has no resolution. Joe Biden will never campaign or speak publicly enough to convince skeptics. Why? Because the main parties to the current Biden controversy have no incentives to say he’s done enough. There are essentially three types of groups involved: the Biden-confident, the good-faith concerned, and the outright detractors.

The Biden-confident

These people are easy to summarize. They support and believe in Joe Biden. They are not nearly as phased by the CNN debate as the others. Yes, they generally think it was a poor performance, and may have even been taken aback by his stumbles in the first portion of the debate. But they see it more as an exception than the rule, believe Biden has the capability to turn it around, and are confident he will turn it around.

Or, at worst, they look at the data and see no obvious other option and believe it will be unnecessarily risky to switch the candidate at this time. So they believe the best approach is to fall in line behind Biden and consolidate support.

This group generally does not believe a litmus test is necessary or legitimate in the first place, and therefore, are not going to say that Biden “passed” a test.

For the record, I am in this category. I am a combination of believing Biden can and will turn things around for the better, thinking Trump will make things worse for himself, and seeing no other obviously better option.

The good-faith concerned

The good-faith concerned folks don’t trust that the debate performance was a one-off. They are riddled with anxiety every time Joe Biden is in the public spotlight, for fear that he’ll gaffe at best, freeze up for an uncomfortable amount of time, or have a life-threatening episode at worst.

In their minds, Joe is showing his age—or ”declining”—at a disturbingly quick pace, and don’t think he can appear, much less be, sufficiently competent for another grueling four months of campaigning. They believe strongly, and very reasonably, that if such a gaffe or episode occurs, support for Biden will crater, and it will be too late for Democrats to replace him on ballots across the country.

This would be a crisis unlike any seen before in American electoral politics, and is simply not worth the risk of just continuing with Biden and “white-knuckling” it for four more months. They probably would have been fine with Biden leading the ticket had the CNN debate not happened. But it did, and now they are not fine with it. They believe it is now more risky to stay the course than not.

There may be more to it than this, but I think this is a fair summary of those that have genuine feelings of humanity for Joe, but also want to beat Trump as badly as anyone, and are fearful that Biden’s decline will limit these prospects.

I personally can understand this position. I don’t subscribe to it, but I understand the logic and can’t blame anyone for feeling this way. Of course, it is a risk to continue with Biden. But to me it seems like a bigger risk to just go with someone else, Kamala Harris included. I could go on and on, but I don’t think I have an original take on this that you have not yet read in one of my posts, notes, or conveyed by other authors somewhere else; and, besides, this was not the point of my writing this.

The outright detractors

These folks may or may not have the same feelings as above, but just don’t like or want Joe Biden, or prefer the controversy above all else. This group covers most of the media and pundit-types, since most regular voters don’t really gain anything from the controversy.

Some of them have been banging the drum of old age and polls for months, if not years, and now see their opportunity to capitalize on the perceived validity of their public statements. This is their chance to will their predicted outcome into existence, so in order for them to remain relevant and legitimate, the result has to be an ousting of Biden.

There are many voters out there that likely want Biden gone for many reasons having to do with politics and policy. They just don’t like him, and probably never truly did, even if they voted for him last time. These people reside largely on the far left, many are perhaps mad about his Gaza/Israeli policies.

I don’t mean to imply that these people are operating in bad-faith; I labelled the first group “good faith” to emphasize their genuineness regarding health or age-related concerns, not necessarily politics or policy disagreements. The detractors just don’t want Biden and will do or say almost anything to get rid of him. That said, they are more willing to make arguments in bad faith to achieve this outcome. It doesn’t mean they are all motivated this way, but this group tends to operate this way.

The incentive problem

The problem with all of these positions is that there is no incentive for anyone to declare that Biden has achieved some milestone and therefore walk back from them.

How do you convince someone that is very concerned about the potential future effects of a non-reversable condition such as aging that they don’t have to worry about this after all? They are unlikely to suddenly think that age-related decline won’t be a problem, or if it is that it will surely wait until after four months from now to manifest.

How do you change the mind of someone that has dug in their heels for months if not years as a detractor? Is there really some new piece of information they will hear that will make them a Joe Biden cheerleader, especially in the current negative environment? As long as polls keep showing that most respondents think age is an issue or that Biden should withdraw this is extremely unlikely.

And for the Biden-confident, admitting Biden passed a litmus pass is a surrender to the legitimacy of such a test. They won’t ever admit he passed, because there’s nothing for him to pass, in their minds. He’s doing fine and, short of passing out on stage, will continue to be doing fine.

So even though there are calls for Joe to do this thing and that thing to convince people he’s up to the job, the reality is that these calls are only to extend the controversy or to set him up for failure. Nothing else makes sense, when you consider the incentives of these groups.

The good-faith concerned group won’t be convinced, because, to them, another episode is potentially right around the corner, regardless of how great he performs at whatever event he’s doing. Their point is that they don’t trust that he can go a full four months without another disturbing episode. So even if we get through July, and even August, they are not going to feel comfortable that something else won’t happen in September or October. In fact, they’ll be even more anxious then, because we’ll be at a point of no return ballot-wise and he’ll be “due” to have another episode. They know they’ll have to just hang on for one of the most uncomfortable rides of their lives.

The detractors are the loudest ones pushing and pushing for Joe Biden to do more. This is because it creates more tension and controversy. And they know that their demands are arbitrary and unreasonable to a degree, and will set the stage for the decisive “failure” of Joe Biden to meet the moment. That is their goal, after all. They want Joe Biden gone, so they are creating a magical litmus test for him to complete. Therefore, by definition, they won’t ever be convinced Bidan has accomplished anything.

The Biden-confident, of course, need no convincing about a concocted scenario they don’t believe in in the first place.

No way out

But, similar to a hiking party getting lost in the haunted woods no matter which direction they go, there is no way out for Biden.

Even if Biden simply “did” the things they demand, who are the people deciding if he did them in a way that was sufficient for the goal of “convincing voters he can do the job”? There is no one, just a panoply of pundits and opinion posters. And they want and need something to opine about to convince voters he cannot do the job.

So surely, Biden will answer a question the wrong way, or seem too “defiant”, or commit some such distasteful error that will turn these people off, and compel them to convince others to be turned off. That’s the nature of the beast.

Therefore, no one has the incentive to say that he’s done enough.

The ones that are fine with him already think he’s done enough, and were not scared into oblivion by the debate performance. So they won’t declare that Biden has passed someone else’s unnecessary and arbitrary competency test.

The ones that are truly concerned about age-related issues won’t ever be convinced, since they believe that something will definitely happen, it’s just a matter of when. So they will never say he’s passed any competency test, ever, because to them the test never ends.

And the detractors will never promote the idea that he has done enough to pass a test, because that goes directly against their agenda. Even if he does “pass”, there will be some reason to say he didn’t. So they’ll either say that he didn’t pass the test, and is therefore not competent enough, or they’ll imply the old test was faulty, and come up with a new test.

Who is the group that will say he’s passed a test? There isn’t one.

That’s the point of this writing. Every single individual out there has no incentive to declare he’s passed a test.

For these reasons, there is no point to a Biden litmus test, and there will be no resolution. The only thing that has relevance is the narrative of the litmus test for him to pass. It is this story that is the point. It will either never go away until or unless he wins. Or it will go away once the next big story is available in an upcoming news cycle.

Eventually, it will get boring to talk of litmus tests. Just like it was back in high school chemistry class.