Last night Biden held an hour-long press conference in the early evening, at the conclusion of the NATO Summit in Washington DC, aired live on the three traditional broadcast networks as well as the cable news networks. (More people watched it than watched this year’s Oscars.) After a few minutes of opening remarks delivered via teleprompter, things got off to a very shaky start when, in the first sentence of his answer to the first question, he referred to Kamala Harris as “Vice-President Trump.”

Uh-oh.

It got better from there, though. I thought David Frum had the best summary of the evening, writing in The Atlantic in an article entitled Biden’s Heartbreaking Press Conference:

“So here’s the heartbreak.

Three-quarters of an hour of detailed, sophisticated answers. Mastery of detail. Knowledge of world personalities. Courtesy to the reporters before him. Accurate recall of facts and figures. Justified pride in a record of accomplishment. A spark of sharp humor at the very end.

Also: Verbal stumbles. Thoughts half-finished. Strangled vocal intonations. Flares of unprompted anger. Glimpses of the politician’s inner monologue—resentment at how underappreciated he is—spoken aloud, as it never should be, in all its narcissism and vulnerability.“

The narcissism and resentment that Frum referenced was my wife’s biggest takeaway from the press conference. She found it very off-putting, and it made her think less of Biden than she did going in.

As such, the press conference appears to have done little to resolve the post-debate chaos that has embroiled the Democratic party. On PredictIt, the Harris contract spent most of today trading above the Biden contract, although in the evening hours the Biden contract has rallied to $0.49 after being mired in the low $0.40s. The current tally of sitting Democrats Congresspeople who have called for Biden to drop out has risen to 1 Senator (Welch, of Vermont) and 18 Representatives.

A group of 24 former Democratic Congresspeople, the most prominent of whom is Senator Harkin of Iowa, released a letter today calling on Biden to release his delegates so that the upcoming DNC could be an open convention, the kind we had in the 30s (and, most recently, in 1952).

A new ABC poll released yesterday says that 85% of voters think Biden is too old to be elected to a new term as President, while 60% think the same of Trump. Those numbers are up from 68% and 44%, respectively, 14 months ago. The poll also indicates that 52% of Biden supporters, and 67% of all voters, think Biden should withdraw.

I don’t know where we go from here.

In other news, today the jury started deliberations in the federal corruption trial of Senator Menendez and did not reach a verdict after their first three hours.