About to turn 80, the age of the oldest president in the United States generates rejection
The times of politics in the United States are as predictable as the seasons. Not even Donald Trump has dared to announce his candidacy ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections, but that’s not to say there isn’t incessant behind-the-scenes activity.
The biggest unknown is presented by the president, Joe Biden, who according to tradition has the right of first refusal, despite his age. In public or private, almost every baron in the party has promised to square with him if he decides to stand for re-election. Poised to turn 80 at the end of this month, he was already the oldest president in the country’s history when he was sworn in nearly two years ago. It doesn’t seem like a good idea to hang on to the experience when every lapse sparks debate about his senility, but the president has repeatedly said he intends to do so, even though he hasn’t made up his mind yet.
Everything indicates that this intention is solid. According to the newspaper ‘The Washington Post’, the president and his wife have already held meetings with their most senior advisers to prepare that potential candidacy for re-election in 2024. In September the first lady said during an interview that she had not yet had time to discuss it with her husband, but the newspaper says that the consultations began that same month. “Family has always come first for him,” her counselor Anita Dunn told ‘Axios’ reporter Mike Allen. The decision is not expected to be made public until early next year.
Senior Democratic Party officials have admitted to making plans for Biden’s re-election campaign, even if he decides not to run, something that has only happened once in history with Lyndon Johnson. “We would be seriously incompetent if we weren’t preparing for it,” a source told Reuters. According to ‘The Washington Post’, a team of 40 people from the National Committee of the Democratic Party has been preparing the operations databases for more than a year, investing in the hinge states that will be key for the next presidential elections, connecting with donors and investigating possible Republican rivals. Among these are already former President Donald Trump, his Vice President Mike Pence and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who will presumably revalidate the position at the polls this Tuesday.
On the Democratic side, the natural successor to stand for election, if Biden decides not to, would be Vice President Kamala Harris, who would also represent the generational change that many are clamoring for. Even so, Harris has not had a chance to shine in the position, which for the first time in history is occupied by a woman, and she has disappointed in her few interventions. That has prompted old party heavyweights like Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton and even some newcomers like California Gov. Gavin Newsom to entertain the idea of jumping into the presidential arena. There is, however, another former presidential candidate in the Biden administration who could also claim his chance: Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend and the first openly gay politician to win a portfolio in the US.
disgruntled citizens
None of them will jump into the ring if Biden decides to rush the opportunity of the two consecutive terms that the Constitution allows him, which does not mean that it is a good idea. In the same pages of ‘The Washington Post’ an opinion article appeared on Wednesday that openly asked Biden and Harris to stay out of the 2024 elections “for the good of the country.”
The vice president, the columnist George Will, author of the book ‘Happy and Discontented Americans’, and a Pulitzer Prize winner for his opinion pieces, considers her too incompetent. “She lacks natural talent. She needs to prepare, but she obviously doesn’t. She is complacent and arrogant, a ruinous mix. She sounds like someone giving a report on a book that hasn’t been read.”
Nobody questions within the party how competent Biden may be, despite the fact that some of his decisions related to what was presumed his strength, foreign policy, have been catastrophic. Thus, the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan that allowed the Taliban to regain power remains for history. With all his hits and misses, the most the president can hope for is for his mental abilities to be questioned.
Biden was known for his fumbles and blunders long before he was Obama’s vice president, but in recent times memory lapses have served to make the opposition paint him as a senile and confused man unable to be the leader of the Western world and take with you the nuclear suitcase. In less than two months, they highlight the moment last September in which he searched the public aloud for Indiana congresswoman Jackie Walorski, who had died the month before in a car accident. The conversation in the ‘NowThisNews’ interview, in which he boasted that he had approved the cancellation of student debt “by one or two votes”, when in fact it was by executive order without going through Congress.
Or the moment last Tuesday when he blamed the war in Iraq for rising inflation, which he quickly tried to correct with “excuse me, the war in Ukraine.” That would have been fine if he hadn’t added, “I’m thinking of Iraq, because that’s where my son died.” Beau Biden died in 2015 at a Maryland military hospital from a brain tumor that the president attributes to chemical exposure suffered by troops deployed to Iraq.
Going forward, Biden can expect to be presented as a senile grandfather in opposition campaigns and Fox talk shows, but in his own party he will always cast the shadow of Ronald Reagan, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s five years after leave the White House. The medical consensus is that this disease begins to show symptoms ten years before it is diagnosed, which is consistent with the observations of his advisers and even his son, Ron. If to this is added the low popularity of the president and the foreseeable beating that his party will suffer at the polls this Tuesday, it is to be assumed that a new Biden candidacy will not excite those who in 2020 only saw in him a quality to vote for him: that was not Trump. However, the ‘rematch’ option is not ruled out either.
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