In the initial post, I wrote that: “if the Republicans nominate the Big Orange, and he's facing off against Eighty-Something Uncle Joe--- either I don't vote----or hope that might turns out to be right and pull the Biden lever).”
Some of my loyal readers either missed that paragraph, or didn’t think I went far enough in my Never Trump Stump Speech.
We live in Maine, in the southern part of the state, which is full of intelligent, moderate people like my wife and me, so our Congressional district (one of two) voted overwhelmingly for Biden in 2020. The northern district voted for Trump, so under Maine’s Electoral College rules, Trump received one of Maine’s four EC votes. Biden got the rest, as he won the state overall, and picked up a total of three EC votes here. That outcome is almost sure to be repeated in 2024, so if I decide not to vote for either The Donald or Uncle Joe, my abstaining is not aiding or abetting Trump. And as I wrote earlier, hope may triumph—-the hope that Biden remains intact for his second term—-and I may well vote for him next November.
Big money Democrats, as I wrote earlier, should have convened a conference call with the White House and told Team Biden that they would not fund his re-election. The Party—-the country—-needs new and younger leadership, and Joe should retire to Wilmington. Had they done that, had they done the right thing (cf. the Jeffrey Katzenberg thing), Joe would have had little choice but to stand down. But none, or few of them, spoke up. This kind of spinelessness in confronting Biden’s weakness is strangely similar to what’s going in today’s Republican Party, where only a few well-known Party leaders are willing to stare down Trump, and state flatly that under no circumstances will they support him.
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A member of Biden's re-election team has suggested he should embrace his age and use it to political advantage in 2024. The pitch was that Mick Jagger and Harrison Ford, both in their eighties, are still active in their careers, and very popular with their audiences.
Biden's adviser on this was Jeffrey Katzenberg, long-time Hollywood mogul, whose advice to Team Biden confirms what William Goldman, the two-time-Oscar-winning screenwriter once famously said about Hollywood and its leaders: "no one [here] knows anything."
You don't need to have been a Government major to know it's pure nonsense to suggest that the responsibilities of the President are even remotely comparable to performing a two-hour set at Madison Square Garden, or filming a movie over a three-week period----- where you're on camera for maybe ten minutes in any one scene before you take a break. Even on an off-day, when the President doesn't have to deal with a crisis, there are decisions about complex issues. You need to be at the top of your mental game. According to the Democratic National Committee---and no one else-----Joe Biden is at the top of his game.
Your average joe makes something like 35,000 decisions per day, the vast number of which happen on auto-pilot, without deliberate thought. And on many days, we ordinary mortals don't make many consequential decisions at all, unless you count choosing your tee time a matter of consequence. But the President must make on any given workday a slew of decisions. The exact number is, of course, highly classified. And if he's not being briefed about important, complex subjects, or making decisions of significance, what are we paying him to do? Drink Diet Coke and watch daytime TV---which I gather is an accurate summary of the Trump Presidency.
Much of the $6.5 trillion the Federal Government will spend this year is administered by the Executive Branch, most by one of the fifteen departments each run by a Cabinet Secretary. That's a lot of money and many decisions needing to be made. Ultimately, all these decision-makers in the Cabinet report to the President. Only Trump had time for his day job and watching daytime television.
There's no evidence from the historical record, none, that eighty-five year old leaders of countries make good decisions. We're supposed to believe that Uncle Joe is an outlier from the historical record. Why? In fact, there's proof that old leaders are bad leaders, and no evidence of any connection between age and wisdom. Quite the contrary. The older you get as a politician the more ornery and short-tempered you become, the worse your decision-making.
The King of Arabia is ninety-four, and the lunatic running Iran is eighty-four. As for those deranged dictators running various turf in Africa? Recall that prince of a leader, Robert Mugabe, of Zimbabwe? He was ninety-three when the Army finally threw him out of power in 2017.
The lesson here is that only corrupt, totalitarian countries allow very old people to run them.
Churchill left office for the last time at age eighty, having been re-elected Prime Minister two years earlier. His cerebral illness finally registered with him, though he should have left government four years earlier, in 1949, when he had the first of his series of strokes. The Churchill we admire did his best work in the early 1940s, when he was in his late sixties.
If Winston Churchill packed it in at eighty, why does Uncle Joe think he's got a later sell-by date? In case you've forgotten, Biden has some serious health history: two brain aneurysms in 1988 that nearly killed him. I'm not impressed with how many push-ups his Press Secretary claims he does every day, or week; nor do I think that the kind of sunglasses he wears says anything important about the man. If someone is dumb enough to believe any of that, we should bring back the poll tax before allowing them anywhere near an election booth.
On November 20, 2024, a few weeks after the next election, Biden will turn eighty-two. If you think Joe Biden's in any way comparable to Churchill, you've been having too many dinners at the Katzenbergs. Why do Biden and his handlers think he'll be a competent president when he's eighty-six? Does any sane bystander of our political circus actually believe that Eigthy-Six is the new Sixty-Six when you're talking about the Presidency? He might make it through a second term without flaming out, and becoming mad, unstable or an invalid cloistered in the White House. But, why should we have to take that chance? Might is not the right question, nor the right standard. Might strongly implies might not. Might means not likely---- a bad bet. It's under fifty percent. Bad odds for America.
(Before we get much deeper into this, if the Republicans nominate the Big Orange, and he's facing off against Eighty-Something Uncle Joe--- either I don't vote----or hope that might turns out to be right and pull the Biden lever).
My problems with Biden go beyond his age. Not only is he too old to run for a second term, but he's a seriously flawed man, and has been for a very long time. And, I’m not thinking here about Hunter, the Ukraine, China and possible bribery, though perhaps I should be----as the reliable data so far uncovered on those topics shows that Uncle Joe is a man without a moral compass. I'm a skeptic, not a cynic, and believe that you can't be a good President without that equipment—-the compass—- by your side all the time. Not just when it’s convenient.
Joe's been in public office for more than fifty years, most of it representing our second smallest state (size), with just over a million residents. Voters in Delaware elected Joe to the Senate six times, and Obama plucked him out of the Senate to add gravitas to the ticket, and it worked. But we shouldn't forget that Joe first ran for the Presidency in 1987 and flamed out, not by plagiarizing Churchill---which might have been a good idea--- but by stealing a speech given by the leader of the British Labor Party, Neil Kinnock. That's like stealing lines from a speech by John Boehner.
Why would we want an eighty-something-year-old President with a wobbly moral compass in charge? Serious people in the Democratic Party, if any such folks exist, should months ago have told Team Biden that re-election was not something they would support. And Joe hates fund-raising (see the Packer book below), so that would have doomed his re-election dream. The Katzenbergs Club should have reminded Uncle Joe that he more or less said in 2020 he'd be a one-term transition President, stabilizing the country after Trump's train wreck.
In 2013 George Packer, of the New Yorker wrote a really good book on the state of what he calls the Inner America. It's penetrating, memorable writing, and well worth reading today, ten years after it was published, because the country's problems of a decade ago are still largely with us.
Packer includes a series of stories about five Americans from various backgrounds, one of whom worked extensively for Biden beginning in the 80s. (See the Jeff Connaughton chapters in the book). Packer paints a portrait of Biden as a nasty user of people, a garden variety career politician who does whatever it takes to get re-elected. This will come as no surprise as we all live in that sad garden of garden-variety politicians, and we’re too lazy to weed them out, but read Packer anyway, as you'll get the details, and see Uncle Joe as the schmoe he really was, and still is.
The Wall Street Journal last week published an essay by medical researchers who've looked at a large sample of patients and their doctors, asking this question: If you're very sick and in a hospital, are you better off with a young or old doctor?
"Our statistical model found that as doctors got older, their patients had higher mortality rates."
Governance is not medicine, and I don't necessarily want some 40-year old new arrival (Mayor Pete) to be my next president.
George Washington became president when he was fifty-seven, and retired when he was sixty-four. Lincoln became president when he was fifty-two. The life expectancy for a white male in America in the 1780s was thirty-eight, so GW was an old man at fifty-seven.
This Presidential age game only gets us so far.
Clinton was forty-six when he was first elected, and Bush 2 was fifty-four. Second only to Trump, Bush 2 was the worst president we've had for the past hundred years. Say what you might about Clinton's moral compass---it was broken----he did a commendable job running the country for eight years. And Bush 2 was a catastrophe.
So, young Presidents aren't guaranteed to do a good job.
But there's no evidence of a really old dude doing a good job. None at all.
Reagan left office when he was seventy-seven, and many knowledgeable observers noticed that his mental faculties were slipping in his second term. Woodrow Wilson, soon after he won re-election, suffered a stroke in his early sixties, and his wife Edith ran the country with a few trusted advisers for the final years of his presidency. Does anyone want Edith Kamala Harris performing this role for us a century later?
We are supposed to be comforted by reports about the number of push-ups Biden can do. That's just as irrelevant as comparing the Presidency to performing at a rock concert (Mick Jagger) or being a movie star (Harrison Ford). Or thinking he's young, vigorous and qualified to hold office because he wears aviator sunglasses.
We should amend the Constitution so that it not only has an entry-level age for the Presidency (thirty-five), but a sell-by date---say no older than sixty-something.
Does Biden really think he's so exceptional that he'll be the first leader of a major democracy, ever, to pull it off in his mid-eighties? He no doubt does because he has a very high opinion of himself. What's particularly galling about all this is that Biden, in his narcissism, is unconcerned about the What If? What If he becomes disabled or dies in office?
Biden will be dead, and we'll have Kamala Harris to run the show until the lights go out.