Put it this way: if by some freak of circumstances the last two people in the United States eligible to be president were Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago and Jimmy Carter in hospice, Jimmy Carter would still be the wiser choice for the country. No contest.
I’m not saying this facetiously or ironically, or even as an underhanded slam against the Carter years. Those years had their problems, as any years do: there’s never been a golden age in America and never will be (there’s no making America great again, as it has yet to be: there’s only making it better). But Carter wasn’t nearly the disastrous president that Ronald Reagan’s fantasyland made him out to be. And anyway Carter isn’t the issue. Trump is. The country would be better off led by any sentient human being with a sense of morals and values than by Trump, making the questions about Joe Biden’s competence, at least in comparison with Trump, laughable.
In a healthier, less fearful and rotting society than ours, we would not be facing a presidential race featuring two men whose 160 years between them makes them more than half as old as the Republic. Men were still fighting World War II when these two were born. If men this old are the best that a country of 330 million people can do, then we have more grave problems than we know.
At 81, Biden’s age shows itself every day. He’s an old 81. He’s shaky. He lacks energy. He’s got memory issues. He’s uninspiring. He’s often embarrassing. He’s putting his own self-importance ahead of the good of the country. If this is ageism, so be it. We tend to put too much stock in old people in this country, buying into the myth that age equals wisdom. Age equals narrower arteries and narrower minds. I’ll take a 16-year-old’s judgment in the voting booth over that of a 75 year old any day. Unfortunately, we’re suffering the tantrums of the boomer generation as its age and eternal self-indulgence shape our politics left and right. It doesn’t bode well, and this Biden-Trump rerun of relics is Exhibit A.
Biden claims he alone can beat Trump, since he already has. It’s the kind of delusional logic that took Napoleon from Austerlitz to Waterloo, or Moscow: Biden’s handlers are already treating him the way the Kremlin handled Brezhnev in the late 70s. He fears news conferences and even sit-down interviews with serious journalists. He fears the present and the immediate. He makes us feel as if he fears his shadow.
So his handlers hide him and make shit up about him, parroting the same talking points about how he’s so sharp, so engaged, so focused, so tireless behind the scenes. Lies as blatant as those Edith Wilson concocted about her husband as he lay dying in the White House after his 1919 stroke, and that Wilson’s cabinet, whose members barely saw him after that, abetted with a year’s worth of fake news in one of the most shameless conspiracies in the nation’s history. Biden isn’t stroked out, but the cocoon and fake news isn’t much different.
He should have declared himself a one-term president, in office to clean up the Trump catastrophe, then made way for a younger generation. His ego got in the way, not without good reason. By any measure, he has had a very successful presidency. By the time he’s done, more jobs will have been in his one term than by any president, including two-term presidents like Ronald Reagan. The exception is Clinton.
He signed a juggernaut of legislation that at one point made him as productive as LBJ, restored American dignity, and has run a scandal-free administration, which can’t be said of Trump. (Contra Fox, OAN and Newsmax congregations, Hunter Biden is not a member of the administration.) If we have to blame Biden for inflation, then we have to blame him for Europe’s and Asia’s, too. He’s not that powerful. Biden’s foreign policy has been solid, his defense of Ukraine well calibrated if ultimately undermined by his indefensible complicity with Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Some of his reasons for clinging to power can’t be downplayed. The Democratic bench is pitiful. It would make sense if this was 1972, when the Democrats’ best and brightest had either been assassinated or had shot themselves in the foot, leaving the likes of Nixon and Kissinger to do to Democrats what they did to Cambodia. But this isn’t 1972. Democrats have been spared untimely deaths or even, the unnecessary departure of Al Franken aside, scandalous resignations for two generations. They should be brimming with leadership. (I don’t mean Kamala Harris out-Pencing Pence in the vice-presidency). Instead they look disorganized, disunited and bankrupt, the moderates among them as foreign to their party as moderate Republicans are in the GOP.
So like his polls, Biden isn’t going anywhere. All seems lost. It doesn’t have to be.
Recall the winter of 2008 when Barack Obama’s candidacy risked oblivion. Reactionaries were doing what they always do, finding a racist deck of cards and pulling every one, among them the spiritual and political mentoring Obama had received from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Nothing Wright had sermonized about was wrong. But America prefers its truths pre-chewed, sugared up and emulsified into bumper-sticker myths. Wright’s truths were as raw as a beating by sugarcanes. In one of the greatest speeches of his life, Obama condemned and praised Wright at the same time but delivered in his “More Perfect Union” speech a fatal blow to those who would still use the old Nixon-Reagan-Bush whistles about race to silence his story, “a story that hasn’t made me the most conventional of candidates,” as Obama put it.
Biden needs a Philadelphia moment. He can certainly deliver it. He needs to go before the nation and say the obvious: I am old. I have lost a step or five. I am not on top of everything. But what president ever has been, ever needs to be, when he surrounds himself with the right cabinet and staff? I mix up Mexico’s president with Gaza and thought the other day that Mitterand was still around. Big deal: Ronald Reagan even before his election thought he was among the Americans liberating the death camps and made up stories about welfare queens. At least my errors are in the right place.
My geography and obituaries are a bit off. My morals and priorities aren’t. I’m an aging president in an aging nation, but age is not defeat. Benjamin Franklin was my age when, at the end of the Constitutional Convention in this city, he answered Elizabeth Willing Powell’s question about what government was crafted: “A republic, if you can keep it,” Franklin told her. This is our challenge: keeping it. This is my challenge to you. This is why we’re doing what we’re doing.
Or something like that.
It’s unfortunate that Biden isn’t running on his record. Instead, he’s running on what a disaster Trump would be. That’s not enough, even though it’s true. And it’s not nothing. Trump is a convicted rapist and a slanderer who faces 91 criminal charges. He’s a white supremacist putting us through what Jeff Sharlet calls “the stress test of fascism.” He runs a family as corrupt as his business, building it on a mountain of lies and nepotism, a Hunter Biden in every dandruff. He glorifies violence and retribution and would pick up as president where the January 6 insurrection left off, hanging noose included. He did not govern in his first term. He’s not about to start now.
As for his mental acuity, it is far worse than Biden’s. Trump is a different kind of senile, the psychopathic kind intensified by a narcissism so acute that he lost a grasp of reality long before he became president the first time. Not only is he not fit to be president, as we learned in four years of political agony and social calamity. He belongs in a prison with mental health services and handy straitjackets.
So yes. Biden is old. He’s slow. He’s forgetful. He trips all over the place, he’s in hiding, and the Democratic Party is a pitiful band of backbenchers who couldn’t give us a more convincing alternative. For all that, compared to Trump he’s still the only credible choice, if it’s a republic we still want.
Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive. A version of this piece airs on WNZF.
