Why did Biden agree to debate, and why now?

We don't know everything, but some of it isn't that hard to figure out.

Yesterday it was announced that Joe Biden has agreed to debate Donald Trump, once next month and once in September.

The first thing that jumps out at you is the very odd timing, both of the agreement and of the debates themselves. Nate Silver, a liberal Democrat but an honest pollster as these things go, had some ideas I thought were interesting.

The first is obvious: The great majority of pundits think, correctly in my view, that Biden is behind. He needs a way to shake up the race, much as McCain needed to shake it up by picking Sarah Palin (and we know how well that worked out). Debating is the obvious choice, and all the better from Biden’s point of view to seem to be the one on offense (although in fact Trump has often said he’d debate anytime, any place).

Still, there are obvious downsides for Biden. Both the number of debates he wants (only two, not the traditional three) and the far-from-election-day scheduling suggest that he, or whoever is making the decisions for him, is aware of them. As Silver notes:

[T]he White House unambiguously wants fewer debates rather than more. [T]hat’s a bad sign for Biden — part of a pattern where the White House has continually tried to minimize his exposure to unscripted moments. I wouldn’t quite say they’ve done the bare minimum when it comes to media appearances. But they’ve done the bare minimum more than the bare minimum, trying to optimize some function of minimizing both their 81-year-old candidate’s exposure, and media criticism about the lack of said exposure. And when they have done media appearances, it’s mostly been with friendly sources like Howard Stern and pointedly not with more adversarial ones like the New York Times or Washington Post.

The idea that Biden has an “adversarial” relationship with slavish Democratic mouthpieces like the NYT and the WaPo is hilarious (as I said, Silver, though straightforward, is playing for the other team), but the overall point is true: Biden needs to seem to be out front while needing at least as much to avoid the risks of actually being out front.

Preferring fewer debates is particularly bad sign given that 1) Biden is trailing in the race and therefore should want more chaos and variance and 2) that the debates went well enough for him last time.

But last time was four years ago, and Biden’s accelerating physical and mental decline isn’t lost on the Democrats.

It may be — as Axios reported this week — that the White House is in denial about its position in the polls and therefore is incorrectly being too risk-averse. That would be bad enough. But it’s an even worse sign if the White House thinks its candidate has lost his fastball and has deteriorated as a debater versus four years ago.

As if there were anything else it could think.

[T]he other excuses the White House has given aren’t convincing. In its letter announcing its pullout from the [traditional] CPD [Commission on Presidential Debates] exchanges, the Biden-Harris campaign cited early voting as a factor, but this is a bullshit excuse. The final CPD debate had been scheduled for October 9. On the equivalent date in 20201, only 5.6 million votes had been cast by mail or early in person out of the 158 million that were eventually tallied — and that was in the middle of a pandemic when early and remote voting were more common. Furthermore, people who vote early tend to be highly motivated partisans and not the swing voters who could plausibly change their minds on the basis of the debates….

By pushing one debate into June, therefore, Biden has made it much less impactful. Whatever effects it has will probably be drowned out by the conventions and then the stretch run of the campaign and umpteen other shifts in the narrative. And the September 10 debate is also relatively early, a week sooner than when the CPD had wanted the first debate.

Or to put it more bluntly, the timing Biden demanded is a sign he’s hedging his bets on his performance, as well he might.

So basically, Biden traded three debates after Labor Day for one debate after Labor Day. If the White House thinks the debates are a liability for Biden, this is a brilliant tactical move.…By throwing this curveball, Biden made it appear as though he proactively wanted more debates when he actually wanted fewer.

Let it not be said that Joe didn’t learn something by playing his shell game against Israel these last few months, before recently delivering his more direct betrayal.

And he doesn’t seem to be paying too much of a PR price for it. The media has mostly gone along with the White House narrative.

What a shock!

There’s one other tactical wrinkle — I suppose I’m skeptical that the White House was thinking about it, but if so, I’ll up their grade [for thinking this through]. By moving the first debate to before the Democratic convention in August, Democrats increase their option value…If Biden totally and irrecoverably screws up in the June debate — he’s just obviously no longer ready for prime time — then he can step down and Democrats can pull the Ezra Klein break-glass-in-case-of-emergency plan and hold a contested convention. It’s not ideal — that’s an understatement — but it’s much less bad than going into the final months of the campaign certain to lose.

This is Silver’s polite way of saying that the risk to the country of re-electing Biden might become so undeniably obvious that the Democratic Party might have to go to Plan B, not because national security demands it but because the Party’s down-ballot survival does.

Quite a group we have here.

After all, if Democrats really think that Trump is an existential threat to democracy or whatever else, that means making the most of their position, however poor it might be, and having Judge Merchan extend his gag order to 2050…

Oooooooooooops, sorry there! Those last ten words are mine, not Nate Silver’s. My mind seems to be wandering. This Manhattan “trial” must be getting to me.

Biden is trailing in the swing states, faces a number of other headwinds, and otherwise holds a fairly bad hand. Today the White House pulled off a great bluff — but if that June debate goes really badly, the only remaining move will be to fold.