This report in the New York Times, titled “Does Joe Biden Want to Be Doing This?,” captures what reporters are witnessing on the campaign trail:

In a tour of about a dozen of these campaign events across the early-voting states during the second half of August, Mr. Biden’s audiences were moderately enthusiastic, always polite and certainly appreciative of his visits. Given their revulsion for the incumbent, many attendees expressed gratitude that Mr. Biden was running for president. But they struggled to identify why he was running, or what the former vice president represented beyond a known and decent entity who was not Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders.

The candidate himself seems somewhat less than overjoyed about the enterprise; though the inveterate back-slapper is still in evidence, it’s hard to imagine him spending four hours after an event so every attendee can get a selfie the way Warren does.

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And yet, Biden continues to lead in the polls, even if that lead has slipped from around 20 points three months ago to around 10 today. But the Democratic primary contest is being led by someone who may not particularly enjoy running for president and is plainly not very good at it. Nothing Biden has done since entering the race shows a candidate more skilled than the one who performed so poorly the last two times he sought the White House. The question is whether that will actually stop him from becoming the nominee.

It’s at this point that we have to remind ourselves that running for president is not the same as being president, and it’s entirely possible to perform splendidly at one job and terribly at the other. Biden could make a case that as the candidate with the most experience — 36 years in the Senate and eight as an extremely active vice president — he is prepared to do the job more effectively than any other candidate.

But while he’s happy to lay that out for you if you ask him, it’s not the way Biden answers the most important question any candidate should be asked: Why are you running?

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Biden’s answer rests on two pillars. First, getting rid of the Oval Office’s current occupant is really all that matters. While it’s nice to have a policy agenda and a vision for the future, that’s far less important than just beating President Trump. And second, Biden is the Democratic candidate most likely to do that.

That’s at least better than some candidates who have no answer at all. But if you are unpersuaded by either of those assertions, there’s not much reason to support Biden.

And while there is no Democrat anywhere who doesn’t think it’s important to beat Trump, it’s the second assertion that is going to be tested in the coming months. My own efforts to get voters to ignore “electability” and just vote for whomever they like will almost certainly fail, but the threat to Biden is not that Democrats will stop worrying about electability but that they’ll decide he isn’t electable after all. They’ll be judging him by his performance on the campaign trail. (It should be noted at this point that most voters aren’t paying much attention to the race yet.) If he seems less than ebullient about campaigning, if he doesn’t perform well in debates (one of the many aspects of campaigning that has nothing to do with being a good president), if he struggles through more micro-controversies, he’ll start looking less and less like someone who can win a general election.

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The fact that Biden’s supporters aren’t brimming over with passion isn’t necessarily fatal; the candidate with the most enthusiastic fans often falls short, as Sanders or Howard Dean could tell you. But it does mean that a significant number of the people who are now telling pollsters they’re backing Biden could slip away to other candidates if he gives them reason to doubt him. It may already be happening, albeit slowly. And he hasn’t shown us yet that he can win over voters he hasn’t already persuaded.