I think a lot of liberals and Democrats are hiding behind the questions of whether the president should drop out of the presidential election and how the Democrats should move forward if he chooses to. I think a lot of us, and I’m going to implicate myself in the interest of fairness, are spending too much time talking about what other people think about Joe Biden and not enough time talking about what we think.
More to the point, I think a lot of liberals and Democrats are not saying what they’re saying when they say last week’s debate was a disaster. They’re not saying it because if they said it out loud for everyone to hear, they would be – and they should be – ashamed of themselves. They recoiled in horror at seeing an old man acting like an old man.
I think it’s important to say this plainly. If Biden is too old for you, you should say so. You should say he should not be president, because he’s too old, not because you think swing voters won’t vote for him. Then we can have a serious conversation that begins with this question:
If Biden is too old – that is, if his “mental acuity” is so compromised – how do we explain everything he’s accomplished, including Friday’s job report, according to which the economy added 206,000 jobs? The Post reported that “even as interest rates remain high, weighing on some parts of the economy, the labor market continues to buoy workers, wages and consumer spending, preventing a broader downturn.”
How do we explain this achievement?
You can’t. And because we can’t, we must conclude that the president’s campaign is now in peril, not because of substance, but because of vibes. The downside is that he might lose because of them. The upside, however, is that you can turn some of these vibes around. You can regain your balance and your confidence, and you can fight like hell.
If you’re old, you’re done
If the president were that far gone, someone somewhere would have pointed out that time when things went very, very wrong. I don’t mean choices. I mean mistakes – serious, consequential, unforced errors.
No one has, not even in recent months, a time when some allege that he’s shown rapid decline. How about the Israel-Hamas war, the worst Middle East conflict any president has faced? Nope. He’s handled that like the statesman he is. Inflation? Nope. He brought it down and dodged a recession. How about the “border crisis.” Also nope. Indeed, not only did Biden not screw that one up. He outfoxed Donald Trump. A change in border policy has led to a record drop in illegal crossings.
But I guess Biden’s accomplishments don’t count for much these days, because, for God’s sake, he lost his train of thought a few times!
If there’s one word that can describe the Biden administration all the way up to last week’s “disastrous debate,” it’s orderly – public servants running the federal government according to the law and Biden’s preferred policies. If, on the basis of that “disastrous debate,” you no longer think Biden can be president, you must reckon with the fact that he has been the president. If you think he’s been showing signs of mental decline for months, you must reckon with the fact that no one can point to a single mistake he’s made during all that time.
And because no one can point to a serious, consequential, unforced error that is the result of his alleged mental deterioration, we must conclude something that’s distasteful to conclude. Maybe the “disastrous debate” says more about us than it does about Biden. It showed us something none of us has seen before, a president aging in public. And our reaction to it showed us something else – that it doesn’t matter how accomplished you are, how good you are, how decent you are, how deserving you are – if you’re old, you’re done.
Now’s the time to answer
Ageism seems to be the root of most of the reaction to the president’s performance. Normal aging, like losing your train of thought, can’t and won’t be tolerated. (If Biden shows several mental lapses, or even just one, it’s over.) Because discrimination against the old is so common, and because weakness, which is associated with age, is so commonly despised in politics, most of the reaction seemed rather reasonable.
And because most of the reaction seemed rather reasonable, a lot of liberals and Democrats lost their nerve. We let the Times editorial board and its columnists, including liberals, undermine our confidence in ourselves. And we let it happen, in part, because we did not fully appreciate the ageist lens through which we watched the debate.
Liberals and Democrats spent more time talking about what other people think of Biden and not enough time talking about what we think. That allowed rather reasonable arguments rooted in ageism to go unanswered. But that was then. Now’s the time to answer them.
