The Art of Getting a Real Answer Out of a President

At a moment of maximum peril for Joe Biden’s campaign, all anyone wanted to know was whether the president was still fit for the challenges of the Oval Office — and whether he would be for the next four years.

The problem as we approached Mr. Biden’s news conference on July 11, the first since his miserable performance at the debate last month, was how to get a new perspective on the president’s condition. Time and time again, in interviews with George Stephanopoulos and encounters with donors and members of Congress, Mr. Biden insisted that he simply had a “bad night.”

His list of explanations was long. A cold. Jet lag. Overscheduling. There was no underlying condition like Parkinson’s, the White House insists, dismissing the idea that his slow, shuffling steps and quiet voice revealed anything more than the usual toll of being 81.

There is an art to asking questions at a presidential news conference, especially if you havehope of getting anything beyond the standard talking points. But we wanted something more.

So as I prepared that day to take The New York Times’s seat — which I have occupied, in rotation with my colleagues, since Bill Clinton’s second term in the late 1990s — I knew that simply asking again whether he had lost his fastball was futile.

Instead, I thought, we wanted to watch him pitch.

My instinct was to ask him a policy question — a complex one, but within his sweet spot: National security. It is the subject he warms to fastest, and knows best. How he processed the query on live TV would give me and others a chance to compare the Joe Biden of the past to the Joe Biden of today.