Out this morning from the New York Times Magazine is a lengthy piece on the brewing debacle involving the Democratic Party’s upcoming primary calendar. Joe Biden has sought to promote South Carolina to first-in-the-nation status in 2024, and New Hampshire isn’t exactly taking it lying down. (The state will likely run its primary first regardless — as required by state law, so jealously do Granite Staters covet their status — and simply omit Joe Biden’s name from the ballot.) At nearly 4,800 words, the Times piece is informative, and in fact perhaps a bit too much of a good thing — near the end, it begins to chase its own tail — especially because for all its length it rather curiously fails to address the elephant in the room: Joe Biden’s weakness as a candidate.

Now, Joe Biden and the state of New Hampshire have never had the warmest of relationships. He dug the grave of his first presidential run there all the way back in April 1987, when, on camera, he infamously tore the head off an actual voter who innocently asked the wholly innocuous question, “What law school did you go to and what was your class rank?” Biden’s response is legendary and deserves to be printed again, because it pretty much served as his epitaph in the state prior to the 2020 general election (my notes in italics):

I think I have a much higher IQ than you, I suspect. I went to law school on a full academic scholarship [he did not] — the only one in my class to have full academic scholarship [he was not]. The first year in law school, I decided I didn’t want to be in law school and ended up in the bottom two-thirds of my class [he was caught in a plagiarism scandal]. And then decided I wanted to stay and went back to law school and, in fact, ended up in the top half of my class [he did not]. I won the international moot court competition [he did not]. I was the outstanding student in the political science department at the end of my year [he was not]. I graduated with three degrees from undergraduate school [he did not] and 165 credits; you only needed 123 credits. I would be delighted to sit down and compare my IQ to yours, Frank [no lie detected].

Read that one more time, friends. Savor it. Again, I’m really just offering it here because, as my colleague Charlie Cooke is fond of pointing out, Biden’s “folksy” media narrative is well crafted to hide just how hall-of-fame-level insecure a “lying dog-faced pony soldier” he himself has always been.

Maybe something about the State of New Hampshire brings out the worst in him, though. His history of humiliation there only begins in 1987; it continues all the way through January 2020, when Biden was destroyed in both Iowa (where his disastrous showing was underplayed because the caucuses themselves were a self-destructive reporting and logistical disaster) and New Hampshire. Biden could argue that he wasn’t competing in the Iowa Caucuses (smart move) but was trying to make a credible showing in New Hampshire, and instead found himself in fifth place behind such political juggernauts as Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar. It is easy to forget just how dismissively Biden was treated in early 2020 by shortsighted liberal-leaning commentators who thought the race was going to be something like Bernie v. Buttigieg. But then South Carolina, with its loyal and heavily African-American (50–60 percent) Democratic primary vote, stepped in to save the day, Biden continued his momentum on Super Tuesday, and suddenly the game was over as quickly as it began.

Biden’s people do not mind that you remember all of this history. The New York Times covers it in great detail. They want, in fact, to distract you with it and make the story about “black voters,” so that you are not asking the question that, amazingly, the Times itself never got around to asking in 4,800 words: Why should any of this have to matter to an incumbent president? Joe Biden is not moving South Carolina to the front of the line and bailing out of New Hampshire entirely to make a statement of woke activism. He is doing it to defend his own political interests in seeking reelection. And so again, the question the Times mysteriously doesn’t ask haunts me, because it betrays such shocking incuriosity: Why would the sitting president of the United States feel the need to shore up his position internally?

Realize: Joe Biden is not running a serious primary campaign. Incumbent presidents rarely do, and when then do it’s an ominous sign for their party overall. (See: Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush.) Neither Robert F. Kennedy Jr. nor Marianne Williamson is a serious candidate who poses a credible threat, however much one of them may embarrass him in New Hampshire. And yet Biden is making these defensive moves anyway. Which would suggest that something else is going on, that there is a different underlying motive altogether.

Of course, I think I know the reason why. I said as much back in May when the issue first came up: Biden can’t do retail campaigning anymore, and New Hampshire at least requires a few in-person appearances, even for a president running unopposed. Everyone knows he’s not up to the task; everyone can see his public appearances of late (he seemed to be decaying before our eyes as he mumbled his way through the statement last Friday about the Supreme Court’s rulings), and the priority is to keep Biden’s potential “exposure” in that sense to the barest minimum until his hand will be forced at least somewhat by the general election. New Hampshire can be treated as a write-off, a mess based on quirky laws and an uncooperative Republican legislature. In reality, it’s a delaying tactic.

Biden’s incumbency (which means his control of the Democratic National Committee) means he will be able to stage-manage his renomination. He will not be seriously threatened absent some kind of medical event (in which case, hello Gavin Newsom!). But it is incredibly telling that his campaign team is willing to incur this fiasco in order to maintain the overall priority: concealing Joe Biden’s weakness from the world as much as possible.