ESTRICH: Biden in the bunker

He just doesn’t get it. And neither do the people closest to him.

When George Stephanopoulos asked him how he would feel if he lost, he told the truth and it was the wrong answer. “I will feel as long as I gave everything and did the good work that I can do, that’s what matters.”

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No, it’s not. The point here is not that Joe Biden is “doing the good work that I know I can do.” No one doubts that Joe Biden will do his best.

This is about saving our democracy.

Biden himself said so. This is the most important election of our lifetime. President Donald Trump, if you listen to his agenda, is not Ronald Reagan, not George HW Bush or George W. Bush, not Mitt Romney or John McCain. He is riskier and more radical and less presidential than any of those candidates. He has no interest in uniting this country. He has promised to take revenge on his opponents. He will take a divided country and divide it further. He will reshape the Supreme Court in his own image for a generation to come. And it will be Joe Biden’s fault.

Joe Biden says he’s not going to let 90 minutes undo 3½ years of successful work. That’s not the problem. No one is taking away his accomplishments of the last 3½ years. The people who are turning on him now are people who supported him for the last four years — in many cases longer — and were prepared to support him going forward.

They’re not turning against him because of one bad night, but because they’re afraid that the man who stumbled and stuttered on that stage is unfit for the office he’s running for and that he’s going to lose.

And it’s getting worse, not better. If Biden was trying to prove he could handle the challenges of the presidency, why did he need his staff to write the questions for the two radio interviews he did after the debate as part of his failed attempt to redeem himself? One of those interviewers has already lost his job, and rightly so.

What does it prove that you can answer questions that your staff has written — and no doubt prepared for you? And he still botched the softballs. They were clearly afraid of letting Joe be Joe, so used to doing it that they did it even when the sole purpose of the exercise was to showcase the man’s skills without a script or autocue.

What that episode revealed is what the press has finally begun to report: that, as a stunning article in New York Magazine reported, there has been some unholy “conspiracy” among Biden’s staff and the press that has been following him to hide his downfall from us. They have not served him, or us, well.

He’s losing his fundraising edge, and it’s going to get worse. Major donors have already said publicly that they’ve turned off the tap. What they say publicly is just the tip of a melting iceberg. Biden says he doesn’t care what the millionaires think, but he’s relied on those millionaires to build his shrinking war chest. He’s not the grassroots fundraising machine his opponent is. There hasn’t been the outpouring of financial support for him since the June 27 disaster that there was for Trump after his conviction. Trump is going to raise and spend more money than he did.

Biden says he’s always been the underdog, that he’s been knocked down before and he’s always gotten up and showed them. He hasn’t. At this point in 2020, he’s ahead of Donald Trump by nine points. As CNN’s chief pollster noted, Kamala Harris polls better among independents than he does. He’s right that he’s been knocked down before, most notably by my friends in 1987, but he didn’t get up and win; he dropped out of the race, which was the right thing to do.

But Biden is convinced he’s going to win, even as the chattering class that once supported him turns against him. I’m sure he believes that. That’s because he lives in a bubble, where people tell him what he wants to hear and the crowds in high school gymnasiums greet him with cheers.

I am an expert in losing campaigns. I have heard people say what they really think and then hold back their punches at the candidate. And did you hear that crowd cheer, the candidates say, cheering crowds are the penicillin for losing candidates to keep going?

The worse the campaign goes, the harder people work in advance to create a cheering crowd. It means nothing.

What Biden needs, and what he deserves, is straight talk and honest truth from people who know how to win elections, from elected officials and party leaders and seasoned strategists who will say to each other what his family will never say to him. He did it right.

But the party is over and it’s time to step aside.