The editorial in the Times calling on President Biden to quit his campaign for a second term is really something — a study in journalistic desperation. Mr. Biden has just won a primary race that has put him in a position to be the Democratic Party’s nominee. Now, at the first whiff of a campaign debate, the Times wants him to quit. “The president’s performance in the debate,” it says, “made it clear that he is not the man he was four years ago.”

Then again, too, the Times isn’t the paper it was four years ago. Four years ago, it issued an endorsement that tried to palm off on the paper’s noble readers the idea that Mr. Biden would be a president for all Americans, “even those who do not support him.” The paper was so full of itself that it issued a separate piece noting that its endorsement made “no mention of Donald Trump.” The “case for the former vice president,” it averred, “needs no foil.”

Goodness gracious. Four years later, we seem to have a different Times altogther. Not only is the paper calling on Mr. Biden to quit. It’s mentioning Mr. Trump by name. One can only imagine what an internal uproar that ignited. Yet we digress. It notes that Mr. Biden claims to have the best chance of defeating the tyranny of Trump. “That,” it says, “is no longer a sufficient rationale for why Mr. Biden should be the Democratic nominee this year.”

The Times has in the past four years acknowledged the problem over which it now wants Mr. Biden to exit the race, but not in a convincing way. Could it be that the Times just fears Mr. Biden can’t win? Our own view is that it’s not Mr. Biden’s aphasia that knocked him off his game at Atlanta. It’s the policies Mr. Trump is advancing — a free market, low-tax, deregulated, pro-growth economy. Mr. Biden lacks the first idea of how to respond.

How could he? He and his party have refused to acknowledge the formative nature of, say, President Kennedy’s supply-side tax cuts. The last Democratic president who even thought about it was Bill Clinton. The Times itself opposes deregulation and sound money. It is uncomfortable with Israel. It does not want to give our voters a say in the abortion question. It is against the whole gamut of the GOP. For years this blinded the Times to Mr. Biden’s aging issues.

Now the Gray Lady writes that the “confidantes and aides who have encouraged the president’s candidacy, and who sheltered him from unscripted appearances in public, should recognize the damage to Mr. Biden’s standing and the unlikelihood that he can repair it.” What about the damage accruing in the wake of the Times’s own encouragement of Mr. Biden’s candidacy and its looking the other way during his trail of unscripted appearances?

The Sun is not calling for Mr. Biden to step down. Our own view is that the 46th president and the press that backed his presidency can lie in the bed they made. It is not age that undid Mr. Biden at Atlanta. It is the ignorance of Democratic candidates and their advisers who made a point of ignoring the intense policy debates that took place within the GOP in the Reagan era and from which Mr. Trump put up his platform.

The problem the Democrats have is not just that Mr. Biden was thrashed by a better debater (a point well-made by our Lawrence Kudlow). He was thrashed by a better program. Americans are not better off than they were four years ago, on the economy, on social issues, or on foreign affairs. That’s a problem that, even with a younger candidate, is going to be hard to address. No wonder the Democrats — and the Times — are desperate.