What makes this all so hard is that a lot of the relevant facts here are like the rabbit-duck illusion. There were tons of data points that, if you looked at them the way the majority of the public was looking at them even before the debate, point to the idea that Biden is too old. Most people have been seeing the duck all along. But I was seeing the rabbit. ...

After the debate, though, I’m seeing the duck.

Biden isn’t doing press conferences. He’s using teleprompters at fundraisers. The joint appearances with Bill Clinton or Barack Obama look like efforts to keep attention off the candidate. It’s not just that he’s avoiding hostile interviews or refusing to sit with the New York Times, he isn’t even doing friendly-but-substantive shows with journalists like Ezra Klein or Chris Hayes. It was a while ago now that I talked to him, and though it went well, I haven’t heard recent rumors of many other off-the-record columnist chats. The seemingly inexplicable decision to skip the Super Bowl interview is perfectly explicable once you see the duck. In a re-election year, a president needs to do two different full-time jobs simultaneously, and Biden was really struggling with that. Apparently foreign governments were sitting on some anecdotes that have now leaked, which I wouldn’t have thought possible.