I missed this when I was off last week but it's still worth talking about. Last Friday NY Times podcast host Ezra Klein made a sustained argument that Joe Biden is too old to run for president again and that, for the good of the party and the country, he should step aside.

Maybe you're thinking that it's too late for all of that but Klein is arguing that it's not, that Democrats still have a better option which we'll get to in a moment. But first, here's a bit of his argument that Biden is too old to win this race.

This is the question Democrats keep wanting to answer, the question the Biden administration keeps pretending only to hear: Can Biden do the job of president? But that is not the question of the 2024 campaign. The insistence that Biden is capable of being president is being used to shut down discussion of whether he’s capable of running for president...

I was stunned when his team declined a Super Bowl interview. Biden is not up by 12 points. He can’t coast to victory here. He is losing. He is behind in most polls. He is behind, despite everything people already know about Donald Trump. He needs to make up ground. If he does not make up ground, Trump wins.

The Super Bowl is one of the biggest audiences you will ever have. And you just skip it? You just say no?...

Biden has done fewer interviews than any recent president, and it’s not close. By this point in their presidencies, Barack Obama had given more than 400 interviews and Trump had given more than 300. Biden has given fewer than 100. And a bunch of them are softball interviews — he’ll go on Conan O’Brien’s podcast, or Jay Shetty’s mindfulness podcast. The Biden team says this is a strategy, that they need apolitical voters, the ones who are not listening to political media. But one, this strategy isn’t working — Biden is down, not up. And two, no one really buys this argument. I don’t buy this argument. This isn’t a strategy chosen from a full universe of options. This is a strategic adaptation to Biden’s perceived limits as a candidate. And what’s worse, it may be a wise one.

Klein walks through the argument that voters will come back to Biden once the campaign becomes the focus of national attention. And it's true that eventually there will be a lot more focus on the GOP nominee but at the same time there will be more focus on Biden as well and it looks to a lot of people like Biden isn't up to it. So what's the alternative? Klein says Biden should step aside and Democrats should hold an open convention. In short, if Biden drops out, state delegates get released to vote for whoever can win them over at the convention. Democrats just pick a candidate in real time, something that used to be pretty common. But Klein does admit this can go horribly wrong.

The last open convention Democrats had was 1968, a disaster of a convention where the Democratic Party split between pro- and anti-Vietnam War factions, where there was violence in the streets, where Democrats lost the election.

The 1968 still haunts Democrats and in fact there are reason to think an open convention this year could turn into a similar mess. The issue wouldn't be the war in Vietnam but the one in Gaza. You have a lot of young progressive activists who've been shutting down streets and bridges on both coasts. They would see an open convention as a chance to go all out for a pro-Palestinian candidate and they could make the convention into a mess.

And then there's the other problem which no one wants to confront.

Everybody I have talked about this, literally everybody, has brought up the same fear. Call it the Kamala Harris problem. In theory, she should be the favorite. But she polls slightly worse than Biden. Democrats don’t trust that she would be a stronger candidate. But they worry that if she wasn’t chosen it would rip the party apart.

Klein believes the open convention would give Harris a chance for a reset and that she might be able to win people over. But if not, there are lots of other candidates out there (he names half a dozen) and if someone came forward and really wow the delegates maybe the problem of moving on from VP Harris would fade away.

Or maybe it wouldn't. Maybe in addition to the divide over Israel and Palestine you'd have a fresh divide between black and white Democrats over how Harris was treated. That could also turn into a disaster. Really, the whole proposal Klein is making here is a crap shoot premised on the idea that Democrats are currently staring at a likely loss this year unless they do something pretty dramatic.

There is one part of Klein's argument which does worry me a bit as someone who wouldn't want to see any of their likely candidates win the presidency. A crap shoot may feel terribly risky if your money is on the table, but it's also likely to attract a lot of onlookers from people amazed to see someone take a real risk in the moment. A Joe Biden convention is likely to be a snoozefest, but an open convention would generate tremendous attention simply because everything would be up for grabs. If Democrats could somehow capitalize on that attention without falling apart and resorting to bitter recriminations and shouting, it might help them. Simply put, Klein's idea is very high risk but also potentially high reward.

Finally, Nate Silver has written a reaction to Klein's argument. Silver also feels that Biden is probably losing this election at the moment and he agrees that Biden should take a hard look at stepping aside. But he also argues for an alternative, which is giving Biden one more chance to prove he's up to this by engaging in some tough media interviews, instead of just dodging them.

In November, there was still theoretically time for another Democrat to enter the race. Now, there isn’t: filing deadlines have passed in all but seven states and the District of Columbia. So as Ezra Klein pointed out in a podcast episode last week, the only option now is for Biden to step aside, perhaps in response to peer pressure from Democratic leaders and people inside the White House.

This is a real option, however. Don’t let anyone gaslight you into believing otherwise. The Democratic convention is not until August2. This is an option that Biden, the White House and Democratic leaders need to seriously consider. It is very far from an ideal option. But if the past couple of weeks are any evidence, it might nevertheless be Democrats’ best option for beating Trump...

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...

This really isn't too much to ask. These are the sorts of interviews that every other recent president has done.

His conclusion is that if Biden can't stand up to 5 hours of tough interviews he has no business asking Americans to make him president for another four years. On that I completely agree.