Dem
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GOP
49
Donald Trump wasn't the only 2024 presidential candidate to sit for a high-profile interview in the last week. As we've already noted, Joe Biden did one too, with radio talker Howard Stern. The biggest story to come out of the interview, and the reason we already wrote about it, was that Biden said he's game for a presidential debate.
Beyond the debate angle, however, Mediaite's Sarah Rumpf had a piece yesterday pointing out that the interview was very smart politics. Her main argument is that "he's too old" is one of Biden's biggest liabilities this campaign cycle (it was probably THE biggest, until the Israel mess came along), and the more that people see and hear him speaking normally on radio and TV, the more it will blunt that line of attack.
We think Rumpf has the right of it, although to her assessment we would add two additional observations. The first is that the Stern interview was a steady supply of softballs. And that's optimal for Biden, because if he just wants people to see him talking and behaving like a normal fellow without dementia, there's no need for him to deal with tough questions of the sort that are most likely to trigger his stutter. He should be going on any show that will tee it up for him, which means sports programming (say, dropping in on the booth for Monday Night Football), or late night/daytime talk shows, or maybe Sesame Street.
Our second observation is that the Stern show, in particular, was ideal, because it reaches a bipartisan audience of mostly younger men, the sort who don't always vote. That kind of audience is gold; the people who compile political e-mail lists would give their firstborn to be able to reach that demographic. Biden can't always hit that particular sweet spot, but he can sometimes (again, something like dropping in on the booth for Monday Night Football).
Incidentally, while we are on the subject of debates, both sides are already setting conditions for their participation. The President's campaign has made clear that steps must be taken to prevent the candidates from shouting over each other (i.e., a kill switch on each candidate's microphone). Meanwhile, the former president's campaign is complaining that the debates are scheduled too late in the year, since they will theoretically take place after early voting has begun. Of course, the whole point of the schedule is to give voters information relatively close to the election, while the timing of the conventions makes it difficult to have the debates much earlier than they already are.
In any case, readers can decide for themselves whether these concerns are reasonable or not, and whether they are "problems that need to be fixed" or if they're really just "excuses so I can avoid the debate without looking like I'm avoiding the debate." (Z)