This upcoming election matters less than you might think. But the vice-presidential candidates, especially if one is named ‘Pompeo,’ could matter a great deal.
If somebody tells you that this will be the most important election of their lifetime, you may ignore them. It won’t be. But 2028 might be.
• What is unusual this year, perhaps even unique, is that both parties have reached the end of their respective cycles. What does a cycle look like? The classic example would be 1824. By that year, three southern agrarians — a mentor and two protégés, neighbors, as it happened, in southside Virginia — had served as president for eight years each. Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe. The country was ready for a change, any change, even a change to John Quincy Adams, whose election in 1824 put an exclamation point to the end of the Jeffersonian cycle.
• Another example would be the election of 1996. On one side of the debate stage stood Bob Dole, still wearing proudly his grievous battlefield wounds from service in World War II. On the other side stood Bill Clinton, still dodging questions about how he had dodged service in the Vietnam War. Dole turned out to be the last candidate in the veteran cycle that had begun in 1952 with Dwight Eisenhower himself. Clinton would be the first candidate in what we’ll call the non-veteran cycle, which, one way or another, will end this year. Trump claimed bone spurs to avoid Vietnam. Biden claimed that the nation’s interest would be best served by his attendance at Syracuse Law School. (After surviving a plagiarism scandal, he finished 76th in a class of 85. A grateful nation then put him on the public payroll for the next half century.)
• In 2024, America is, as the pundit class reminds us daily, deeply divided. But we are united in one overriding desire. Clearly, we are ready for a change. And, just as clearly, we are not going to get it. The November election will decide nothing. If Biden wins, it will be because Trump was worse. If Trump wins, Biden was worse.
• Conditions would seem to be perfect, you might think, for a third-party alternative. The polls suggest that almost one voter in three is still searching for a viable option to Biden and Trump. But no viable option has appeared: Robert Kennedy is kooky; Jill Stein is kookier; Cornel West is kookier still. If you’re an incurable optimist, you may hold out hope that the smoke-filled room at No Labels will produce an electrifying ticket of Bland and Blander, but that’s probably not the way to bet, either.
• So let’s talk candidly about the monster in the room. Age. Bill Clinton served two terms as president in the previous century. He is the same age as Trump, four years younger than Biden. We haven’t seen much of Clinton recently, but we’ve all seen Biden shaking hands with imaginary friends and heard Trump making statements that, only a few years ago, we would have sworn he knew to be false. Both of them are old men, failing old men. (Once in the long ago, I drafted a somewhat plausible but highly defensive statement contending that candidate Ronald Reagan was not too old to serve as president. He was then 14 years younger than Biden is today.)
• I live part of the year in one of Florida’s terminal sun colonies. I am familiar, intimately so, with the Biden-Trump demographic cohort. Many of my friends could extract a note from a doctor declaring them to be in excellent physical condition. But 80 is not the new 40. I exchanged greetings with one healthy friend on New Year’s Day and I lunched with another on Presidents’ Day, and last week, I picked up the local newspaper to read that both of them had departed “after a brief illness.” In the Biden-Trump cohort, numerous medical conditions, all of them manageable in middle years, compete for the honor of delivering the final blow.
• One of the two questions Biden tried to answer in his campaign kickoff speech (billed misleadingly by the White House as the State of the Union address) was this one: Does he have the vigor to serve as commander in chief for the next four years? My guess is that he did himself a little good. He may have nudged the needle from No toward Maybe.
• The other question was larger: Is he the man to lead America into the future? I had assumed that he would address the nation’s pressing concerns, which I would identify in no particular order as the debt, military preparedness (especially vis-à-vis China), our slipping K–16 schools, and the toxic (but still nameless) mix of crime, drugs, and social disorder that we all feel closing in on us. Over the course of a packed, hour-long speech, Biden ignored all of these existential issues and, instead, hammered away on throwback, partisan tropes: EV subsidies, loan forgiveness, teacher-pay raises, cut-rate pharmaceuticals, housing grants, higher minimum wages — a long list of big-ticket spending proposals coming at a moment when interest payments on the national debt have just surged past defense spending as a share of the federal budget. I think we can say, No, he’s not the man to lead us into the future. Even Bill Clinton was more of a New Democrat.
• Which leads us to still another unusual aspect of this election. This one might be the first election, possibly ever, when the vice-presidential nominees really make the difference. The vice presidency has always been a high-percentage shot at the presidency. Think Nixon, Johnson, Bush, and Biden himself. That’s why power-hungry politicians lust for the powerless office. But this year will be different in that the vice president is likely to become president before he or she runs for the office.
• Biden is locked in. Unless Doug Emhoff, the second gentleman who in real life is a dealmaking Hollywood lawyer, can pull a rabbit out of his hat, it’s going to be Kamala Harris.
• Trump will thus be badgered by the media to make a truly presidential decision, not about the cabinet or the Court or even about his splendid self, but about the future of the country. About his choice for vice president.
• I’m hoping, but not betting, that he’ll pass over the likeable but obsequious candidates — the Tim Scotts and the Kristi Noems — and select a strong and capable executive like Mike Pompeo.