I went down a YouTube rabbit hole...

Watching Joe Biden through the decades.

I went down a YouTube rabbit hole the other day.

No, not watching QAnon videos or Mr. Beast. I was watching President Biden’s interview with George Stephanopoulos, and then, suddenly, YouTube started sending me to all kinds of Biden videos, new and old.

After all, there is quite possibly no politician active today who has spent more time in the public eye than Joe Biden. (Unless King Charles counts, maybe?) So, I watched, letting the YouTube algorithm guide me through decades of Senator, then Vice President, and finally President, Biden.

There Biden was announcing his 1988 campaign for president, clearly attempting to do his best Kennedy impression as he roars — not in the slightly unsettling way he yells today, but in a much more natural inflection — that “with the grace of God, and the support of the American people,” he intends to be a president who is honest with the public.

There he is in 2008 and 2012, ably delivering jabs in debates with Sarah Palin and Paul Ryan. Then, back to 1992, in a great video captured from a presidential debate spin room, as then-Sen. Biden marvels at then-President George H.W. Bush’s poor performance: “He wasn’t even in it. He didn’t get it. He doesn’t understand. I don’t know what’s going on.”

Before long, YouTube has directed me to Biden’s famous interview with Stephen Colbert in 2015, an emotional conversation that Colbert credits with saving his show and — more importantly — that helped inspire a Biden-for-president boomlet that almost led the VP to run for the top job in 2016.

The Biden-Colbert interview is a perfect display of the empathy that has long been Biden’s political superpower. It’s less than four months after his beloved son Beau’s death, and the grief is clearly still raw. But, even as he speaks powerfully about Beau and what his son meant to him, Biden repeatedly attempts to center other people’s mourning in front of his own — including that of Colbert, whose life was also marked by tragedy. (His father and two brothers died in a plane crash when he was 10 years old.)

“First of all, it’s a little embarrassing this being about me,” Biden says at one point, when asked about Beau. “So many people — maybe some people in the audience — have had losses as severe or worse than mine, and didn’t have the incredible support I have… I feel self-conscious talking about [it]… There are so many other people going through this.”

It’s the sort of line that might sound like pandering delivered by another politician, but coming from Biden, it manages to sound heartfelt.

From there, it’s onto more recent Biden, including a “60 Minutes” interview from 2020 and a CNN town hall in 2021. And then — true story — it sends me back to the Stephanopoulos interview, so I watch the Stephanopoulos interview again.

The changes are all the more jarring because I have spent the last hour watching them unfold.

Of course, there are the physical differences: a face that was once one of the more expressive in American politics (remember his reactions behind Obama during State of the Union speeches?) has now gone slack. Eyes that danced, alternatively, with joy and mourning in the Colbert interview now seem somewhat vacant. His voice, already growing gravelly in the 2020 and 2021 clips, is now hoarse enough that it can sometimes be difficult to understand.

He also appears nervous — of saying the wrong thing, or of saying too much. As a result, this world-famous talker gives short, clipped answers. Asked if he can beat Donald Trump, the president replies: “Yes.” He has just been given an opportunity, in primetime, to make the case against Trump, to get a knock or two in, and he doesn’t — or, possibly, can’t. Later, when asked how he plans to turn the campaign around, the best he can muster is: “You saw it today. How many— how many people draw crowds like I did today?” Crowd size, to state the obvious, is not a campaign strategy.

Throughout the interview, Biden is unmistakably frail and seemingly exhausted. He always stuttered and sometimes slurred his words — now, in several answers, he weaves in and out of points that have nothing to do with each other (much like he did in the Robert Hur interview). Asked whether he knew how bad the debate was as it was going on, Biden begins by answering about his preparation process, and then suddenly he is talking about a New York Times poll, and then onto Trump’s lies told during the debate, without offering any connective tissue between the assertions.

Above all, though, he now seems devoid of the empathy that was once at the core of his political appeal. He appears embittered, self-centered. In the answer that has most haunted his fellow Democrats, Biden is asked how he will feel if he stays in the race and Trump is elected in November. “I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the good as job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about,” he responds.

Again and again, he is asked about his condition — questions he must answer, to be sure, but questions that a younger Biden would have shrugged off and turned into lay-up opportunities to talk about the American people’s condition. He doesn’t, both because that ability to flash a grin and make a clever pivot doesn’t seem as readily accessible and because he suddenly seems most comfortable talking about himself. The humility that marks his previous interviews is replaced with a dogged certainty that he is the only Democrat who can beat Donald Trump and be president of the United States for the next four years. The vibe is very “I alone can fix it.”

Biden always had an angry and immodest streak — in another 1988 video I watched, he can be seen telling a voter “I probably have a much higher IQ than you, I expect,” — but has usually been able to contain it. In the Stephanopoulos interview, the anger seems to have placed him deep in denial. “I don’t buy that,” he says when told he is losing in the polls to Trump, sounding detached from reality.

In one 2020 interview I watched, Biden waves off polls that show him in the lead: “I feel superstitious when I predict anything other than it’s gonna be a hard fight.” Now, he clings to the opposite (insisting that he’s winning) even when faced with the opposite evidence (poll after poll showing that he’s losing).

An earlier Biden, asked about Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) raising concerns about his candidacy, might have breezily discussed his friendship with Warner and their polite disagreement today. But today’s Biden lashes out, even bizarrely seeming to accuse Warner of speaking up out of jealousy, because he wants to be president, too. (There’s no evidence of that.) “He’s the only one” who wants me to quit, Biden says. (He isn’t.)

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one going down a similar rabbit hole. In many of the videos, YouTube shows comments from viewers noting Biden’s aging, a digital paper trail following him through the decades. “Who’s here after the debate?” reads one comment on the Colbert interview. “Lmao such a big difference.”

“After what I saw today,” another reads, “this is like seeing two different Bidens.” Another: “Wow what a difference… Getting old is not easy.” And another: “Damn, 8 years can really f— you up.”

“God, the difference is heartbreaking,” one viewer writes.

One moment from that interview echoes in my ears, as Biden tells Colbert that “nobody has a right, in my view, to seek [the presidency] unless they’re willing to give it 110% of who they are.” That year, he added in a raw analysis of his limitations, “I’d be lying if I said” that I have “my whole heart, my whole soul, my energy, my passion to do this.” Later, the crowd chants “Joe! Joe! Joe!”: their way of telling him he does.

Eight years later, we’ve reached the inverse situation: Biden says he is convinced he has the energy and acuity to mount a presidential run. According to the polls, almost three-fourths of Americans disagree. The process of aging is not unique to Biden, of course: many of us have seen elderly relatives go through similar. But few people have spent as much time in front of cameras, for as much of their life — from being the youngest senator to the oldest president — as Biden, making it uniquely possible to watch his decline before your eyes.

Lately, a defense of Biden has been that he has never been a polished performer: “Hey media: you know Joe Biden was never slick or smooth,” former Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) recently tweeted. “What did you expect?” This is true, he wasn’t. But the videos are readily available — you can watch for yourself what a not-slick-or-smooth Biden sounded like in 1988 or 2008, or even 2020, and what it sounds like now. The differences are glaring, especially as he asks for the American people’s trust for four more years.

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Back to the present day

This will be a critical week for Biden to prove that he can — as he failed to do in the debate and the ABC interview — make the case against Donald Trump, calming Democratic fears.

Already, nine Democratic members of Congress have called for Biden to withdraw — while many others have done so privately (including on a high-profile call last night) or publicly expressed concerns. Congress is set to reconvene today, meaning more Democrats will be forced to answer reporters’ questions, giving them a chance to either stick with Biden or urge him to pull the plug.

Biden is trying to head off such calls this morning, with a letter to congressional Democrats and a call-in appearance on “Morning Joe.”

“It’s time to come together, move forward as a unified party, and defeat Donald Trump,” he wrote defiantly.

The next several days will be a test of whether Biden’s fellow Democrats are prepared to do that, putting aside deep worries — and drooping poll numbers — in the name of presidential loyalty and party unity.

“Voters do have questions,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) said on CNN this weekend. “Personally, I love Joe Biden, and I don’t know that the interview on Friday night did enough to answer those questions. This week is going to be absolutely critical. I think the president needs to do more.”