It’s still a very bad idea for him to run again.
It’s still a very bad idea for him to run again.
J oe Biden 2024 is a bad idea whose time has come.
If Democrats had gotten the shellacking that seemed to be coming their way in the midterms, Biden might have been wounded enough for elements of the Democratic establishment to begin to try to shoulder him into retirement.
Instead, the Democratic overperformance has Biden looking revitalized. Gavin Newsom told the president on Election Night that he’s not running against him (not that Biden was ever likely to face a direct primary challenge). Press coverage has emphasized Biden’s vindication. The shot in the arm is understandable given what his party was able to pull off, yet it doesn’t make Biden a day younger — in fact, he just turned 80, and every day of his presidency is an experiment in whether an unprecedentedly aged president can perform at the level demanded of the office.
Democrats consider Biden the safe choice in 2024, since he’s the incumbent and surrounded by flawed alternatives, yet he is actually an enormous risk.
Nominating him again would be extremely reckless, both for the party and for the country.
First, the partisan considerations. It may well be that Biden, even in his enfeebled state, is the best matchup against Donald Trump. He beat him once before, after all, and used him as an effective foil during the midterms. It is to Biden’s advantage that it has proven difficult for anyone to work up a passionate hatred of him, rather than a low-intensity sense of pity or contempt. (That so many had hated Hillary Clinton for so long was her ultimate undoing in 2016.) Biden still has a relatively moderate affect and profile — there are limits to how woke an 80-something, silver-haired creature of the Democratic establishment can appear, no matter how far left his policies are.
But there’s no guarantee that Biden will get Trump as his opponent. The former president has as good a chance as anybody of winning the Republican nomination, but he’s less of a prohibitive favorite than he was a month ago.
If Biden doesn’t get Trump, then he’ll be denied the dynamic of one old guy whose record is terrible running against another old guy who frightens people. Trump would try to make age an issue against Biden, but he is nearly as old. Age wouldn’t be much of a consideration in a Biden–Trump race, except for people wondering how we got locked into running such old, deeply flawed candidates — not once, but twice.
If Trump can’t secure the GOP nomination, though, everything changes. Ron DeSantis is 44 years old. Ted Cruz is 51. Mike Pompeo is 58. Tim Scott is 47.
Basically, any Republican nominee besides Trump would instantly be bequeathed a powerful past-vs.-future theme (age aside, Trump will unavoidably and perhaps explicitly be running a campaign of restoration). Whatever edge Democrats imagine Biden would have against Trump disappears against, say, Ron DeSantis, a candidate nearly half Biden’s age who hasn’t repelled the middle of the country and isn’t obsessed with the 2020 election.
There’s another risk for Democrats as well — namely, that Biden will experience some age-related meltdown in public during a general-election campaign that will make his struggles undeniable even to well-wishers determined to look the other way.
Charles de Gaulle said old age is a shipwreck, and although Biden has been able to navigate the shoals so far, that won’t be the case forever.
Ageing is a progressive condition. Biden isn’t getting any younger or more capable. The good news is that, today, right now, he is as fit as he’ll ever be to perform his duties; the bad news is that there are a lot of days between now and 2024 when he’ll be less fit, whether by a tiny increment or by a lot.
In short, any Democrat who believes that Biden is guaranteed to make it through a 2024 campaign without incident is fooling him- or herself. There already have been numerous disturbing episodes, and they will continue to pile up.
And voters have noticed. According to the exit polls, 58 percent of voters said Biden does not have the acuity to serve effectively as president.
If Democrats get their way, this is just the beginning. They propose to reelect a man who will be 82 years old on Inauguration Day, and 86 by the end of his second term.
The actuarial tables and the realities of ageing being what they are, this creates considerable risk of putting the country through the trauma of having a president who is incapable of carrying out his full term. If you think our politics are deranged now, just wait until we face a genuine, inevitably wrenching 25th Amendment crisis, or we have to deal with the legitimacy issues around an unelected president.
Why even consider going down this route? Because Joe Biden made an identity-politics choice for vice president, and not a good one, and the Democratic bench is otherwise so depleted that Uncle Joe looks like the irreplaceable giant of Democratic politics.
It is understandable that the prospect of Kamala Harris makes Democrats want to cling to their nurse for fear of something worse. But the country deserves a better idea.