Joe Biden failed the Seacrest test.
He clearly can't serve until January 2029.
This morning, statistician Nate Silver is out with a new piece telling President Joe Biden that he either needs to demonstrate sufficient cognitive capacity to serve another term with lengthy interviews or end his reelection campaign:
Here's what I'd propose. Over the course of the next several weeks, Biden should do four lengthy sitdown interviews with “non-friendly” sources. “Non-friendly” doesn't mean hostile: nonpartisan reporters with a track record of asking tough questions would work great. A complete recording of the interviews should be made public. The interviews ought to include a mix of different media (e.g. television and print) and journalistic perspectives.
I’m all for generosity of spirit and giving people a chance to prove themselves, but I think it’s already clear that Biden lacks the capacity to campaign for a second term, let alone govern until the end of the decade. Why? On New Year’s Eve, Biden failed what I’ll call the “Seacrest test.”
How did he fail?
Tasked with answering a few questions from a friendly talk show host — "What sort of holiday foods have you been enjoying?" and "What are your hopes for the new year?"— Biden required a note card. This suggests to me that Biden’s handlers — and perhaps Biden himself — lack confidence in his ability to answer the simplest of questions without significant preparation.
If the president can’t share his love of Italian food and a few details about Bidenomics without a note card, how can he manage a crisis meeting at 2 AM in the Situation Room?
Let’s pretend it’s December 2028 and an 86-year-old Biden is summoned to the Situation Room in the middle of the night. Russian President Vladimir Putin has threatened to unleash an anti-satellite nuclear weapon — possibly destroying modern life as we know it — if Biden doesn’t let Russian troops occupy Narva, Estonia, where Russian-speaking separatists have been agitating for secession from the EU, NATO, and Estonia for many months. An exhausted and confused 86-year-old man is yanked out of bed. Biden must now decide if he’s willing to defend “every inch of NATO territory” with the potential consequence of Putin wiping out the satellites responsible for everything from mobile phone service to our own nuclear defense systems.
Are voters — who’ve watched their own parents, friends and former teachers age — supposed to believe that a man who needed a note card to chat with Seacrest at 81 will have the physical and cognitive capacity to address this kind of crisis at 82? 83? 84? 85? 86? We’ve all had challenging — painful, heartbreaking — conversations with elderly relatives about deciding what to eat for dinner and other mundane things. Would we trust these loved ones with a major decision about the family wealth or a grandchild’s cancer treatment? As Judge Judy might say, “don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining.” Or, to use less crude language, “the public is smart.”
Biden failed the Seacrest test and needs to pass the torch to a younger Democratic nominee in Chicago.