Two appearances, two completely different Bidens

Millions of Americans saw Joe Biden on Thursday evening: hesitant, hesitant, writhing and weighed down by all his 81 years. Democrats were stunned.

Fourteen hours later, a smaller number of television viewers saw a different Joe Biden: powerful and confident, easily delivering political blows to former President Donald J. Trump. Democrats in the room cheered.

Biden and his allies would undoubtedly have wished the performances had been conducted in reverse order. Joe Biden One’s tepid and weak debate performance created an immediate panic among those determined to see Trump lose in November. Some publicly mooted the unthinkable: a new candidate.

The afternoon performance at a North Carolina fairgrounds was attended by far fewer people and showed little sign of immediately quelling the outrage among Washington advisers, media pundits and ordinary voters.

And yet, amid all the panic, Joe Biden Two showed that even after 50 years in public life, he can still pump his fist in the air, whip up a crowd and perhaps inspire an unruly coalition to vote for him once more.

But questions remain. Would Mr. Biden have been able to navigate the debate’s rigid rules, which stipulated no notes, no teleprompter and no audience for 90 minutes? And even if he had appeared on Thursday night, would he have been able to appear day in and day out for the remaining four months of the campaign?

The Republican answer was no, even before Thursday’s debate. That portion of Trump’s attacks on Biden will surely only increase in the coming days. And some Democrats who had long privately worried that the answer was no showed they were more willing to say so in public, at least for now.

Early Friday morning after the debate, Biden gave reporters an uninspiring “I think we did a good job.” By Friday afternoon, he acknowledged his age and its impact on his ability to perform on the biggest political stage.

“I know I’m not a young man,” he told his supporters, adding: “I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to.”

But the differences between the two performances couldn’t have been greater.

On Thursday evening, Joe Biden One struggled to deliver sharp and coherent criticism of Trump, despite spending more than a week at Camp David, surrounded by a rotating cast of staff and having had ample time to rest.

He started off answering a question about debt by mixing up trillionaires and billionaires and then bragged about “what I’ve been able to do with the, with, with the Covid — excuse me, with dealing with everything that we have to do.” And after hesitating for a while, he ended with a blunt statement: “We finally beat Medicare.”

That gave Mr. Trump one of his many openings: “Well, he’s right. He beat Medicare. He beat it to death.”

Joe Biden Two was a stark contrast. For about 20 minutes — and with the help of an autocue and an enthusiastic audience — he rarely missed a beat.

“He holds, and I mean this sincerely, a new record for most lies told in a single debate,” Mr. Biden said of Mr. Trump.

Biden accused Trump of being one of two presidents who left office with fewer American jobs than he started with. He said, “That’s why I call him Donald ‘Herbert Hoover’ Trump.”

After listing the cases against his rival, Mr. Biden said: “I thought to myself, Donald Trump is not just a convicted felon. Donald Trump is a one-man crime spree.”

All three were the kind of pointed comments that could have yielded enormous political benefits if they had been delivered with the same enthusiasm on Thursday night.

Joe Biden Two provided clear and concise descriptions of his positions on abortion, immigration, taxes and race. Joe Biden One confusingly conflated the issues, sometimes in the same sentence. Joe Biden Two was clear about Trump’s threat to democracy. Joe Biden One left viewers with questions about the topic that the president has long said motivated his 2020 candidacy.

It remains to be seen whether Biden’s comments on Friday will resonate on social media or be repeated enough by the press to make a difference.

But either way, the president’s supporters faced a difficult reality: The only way a candidate named Joe Biden will beat Mr. Trump for another four years in the White House is to ensure that the version that every day Joe Biden appears Two is. .

Reid Hoffman, one of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors, appeared to harbor that hope, emailing his network on Friday in an effort to quell talk of Biden’s replacement.

“I followed Biden’s meeting in North Carolina this afternoon. He was energetic and brutally effective in taking down Trump’s vitriol and lies,” he wrote, adding: “I wish we had that Biden last night, but that’s the nature of Joe Biden. When he does poorly, he has a tendency to bounce back – and then win.”