Devastating new polls show that voters have decisively turned against President Joe Biden, and that if the election were held today, Donald Trump will defeat him handily. The main reason voters oppose him is that they think he’s too old. Unlike other issues, this one is impossible to reverse.
Joe Biden and the Democrats: A Slow-Motion Train Wreck of Their Own Making
A new Washington Post-ABC News poll places the Presidentâs approval rating at a record low, 36%. In the modern era, no president has been reelected with numbers like these.
58% of Democrats want their party to nominate someone other than Joe Biden in 2024. Of Democrats.
If the election were held today, Donald Trump would beat Joe Biden by four points.
Only 32% of voters think Biden has sufficient mental sharpness to do a presidentâs job.
This, as grim is it all is, is the good news. Enjoy, Democrats! Because itâs downhill from here. The economy is, as usual stupid, the biggest issue; just as the campaign begins this fall, so will a recession, according to the Federal Reserve Bank. Then thereâs Hunter Bidenâs pesky laptop, the gift that keeps on giving to the Republicans. Whether Joe proves to be âthe big guyâ who gets slices of kickbacks or the $13 million that mysteriously wound up in his bank account in 2017 and 2018 turns out to be a bribe paid by an Uzbekistani telecom or some other scandal related to the crack-addict deadbeat-dad son who refuses to shut up, itâs beginning to smell a lot like whoop-ass.
Biden reminds me of the classic âTales from the Darksideâ episode in which a grandfather is too stubborn to admit that heâs dead even as chunks of flesh slip off his face. The American people have a clear, loud message for the president, which he refuses to hear: we hired you for one term. Which is kind of what he promised.
It isnât, of course, too late to reverse course. Nothing prevents the president from announcing: âWell, on second thought, actually Iâd like to spend more time with my great-great-grandchildren.â Who knows? With Joe an officially lame duck, Kamala Harris might step up and impress us with her border czarina gigâor her new AI thingie.
Could be heâs up to some 17-dimensional chess, as suggested by my fellow Centerclip contributor Rina Shah. Shah recently mused, and I think sheâs on to something, that Biden officially announced in order to clear the field of Democratic competitors and set the stage for him to anoint his chosen successor whether they be Harris or someone less impressively unpopular. Such political bait-and-switch would be a new lowâbut donât forget, we are talking about a guy who got 51 former intelligence officers to manipulate a presidential election for him, while risking World War III.
Short of these two options, what can an incumbent president who is disliked, disrespected and deemed to be dim, do to dodge defeat?
We know what Democrats plan to do: what worked in 2020.
Biden will point out that heâs not Trump. âCompare him to the alternative,â Biden surrogate Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) says. He wonât campaign. âFrankly, the best way to run for re-election as president is to be president,â Coons argues. Heâll avoid debating his Democratic primary challengers. Heâll hope Trump goes to prison (as if the legal system could act quickly).
But 2024 isnât 2020. The pandemic is over. America is outside again. Americans expect their president to be out there with them.
âWatch me. Itâs all I can say.â Thatâs what Biden says whenever a reporter asks whether heâs too old for his job. Trouble for him is, we have been watchingâfor three yearsâand the results are in that Washington Post-ABC News poll. Fair or not, we donât like what we see.
Biden and the Democrats canât talk their way out of the widespread perception that the president is past his due date. Cries of âageismâ are falling on deaf ears, including among the 62% of voters over age 65 who think Biden is too old. Thereâs one possible solution: stop hidinâ Biden.
Put the President out in front of the White House press corps every single day of the week, fielding unscripted questions, no cheatsheets allowed. Have him do weekly town halls, including in hostile Republican territory. Grant presidential interviews to vicious right-wingers like Sean Hannityâand donât forget left-wing progressives. If Biden does all that for months on end and manages to hold his own, he might turn some of us into believers.
Bidenâs staffers and advisers, many of whom worked for Obama, are not stupid people. They know what must be done to save this doomed reelection campaign. Unfortunately, they know they canât do it. Biden isnât up to a tough race.
So here the Democrats go, eyes wide-open, standing like idiots on the tracks as the train appears in the distance and slowly draws nearer. Disaster is as avoidable as can be. They can amble off those tracks any time. All they have to do to save themselves is make a move.
Right now, theyâre paralyzed.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and co-hosts âThe Final Countdownâ radio show Mon-Fri 10 am â 12 noon ET. You can support Tedâs hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
Can We Make It President Breyer?
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer was pressured to retire by Democrats who are worried that Republicans would re-capture the Senate and would get to choose his replacement in the event that he were to die at the age of 83. Meanwhile, there is no pressure whatsoever to replace President Joe Biden, even though his mental and physical state are clearly not as sharp as Breyer’s.
ANewDomain.net Essay: Donât Hire Anyone Over 30: Ageism in Silicon Valley
Originally published at ANewDomain.net:
Most people know that Silicon Valley has a diversity problem. Women and ethnic minorities are underrepresented in Big Tech. Racist and sexist job discrimination are obviously unfair. They also shape a toxic, insular white male âbroâ culture that generates periodic frat-boy eruptions (see, for example, the recent wine-fueled rant of an Uber executive who mused â to journalists â that heâd like to pay journalists to dig up dirt on journalists who criticize Uber. What could go wrong?)
After years of criticism, tech executives are finally starting to pay attention â and some are promising to recruit more women, blacks and Latinos.
This is progress, but it still leaves Silicon Valley with its biggest dirty secret: rampant, brazen age discrimination.
âWalk into any hot tech company and youâll find disproportionate representation of young Caucasian and Asian males,â University of Washington computer scientist Ed Lazowska told The San Francisco Chronicle. âAll forms of diversity are important, for the same reasons: workforce demand, equality of opportunity and quality of end product.â
Overt bigotry against older workers â weâre talking about anyone over 30 here â has been baked into the Valleyâs infantile attitudes since the dot-com crash 14 years ago.
Life may begin at 50 elsewhere, but in the tech biz the only thing certain about middle age is unemployment.
The tone is set by the industryâs top CEOs. âWhen Mark Zuckerberg was 22, he said five words that might haunt him forever. âYounger people are just smarter,â the Facebook wunderkind told his audience at a Y Combinator event at Stanford University in 2007. If the merits of youth were celebrated in Silicon Valley at the time, they have become even more enshrined since,â Alison Griswold writes in Slate.
Itâs illegal, under the federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, to pass up a potential employee for hire, or to fail to promote, or to fire a worker, for being too old. But donât bother telling that to a tech executive. What used to be a meritocracy has become a donât-hire-anyone-over-30 (certainly not over 40) â right under the nose of the tech media.
Which isnât surprising. The supposed watchdogs of the Fourth Estate are wearing the same blinders as their supposed prey. The staffs of news sites like Valleywag and Techcrunch skew as young as the companies they cover.
A 2013 BuzzFeed piece titled â What Itâs Like Being The Oldest BuzzFeed Employeeâ (subhead: âI am so, so lost, every workday.â) by a 53-year-old BuzzFeed editor âold enough to be the father of nearly every other editorial employeeâ (average age: late 20s) reads like a repentant landlord-class sandwich-board confession during Chinaâs Cultural Revolution: âThese whiz-kids completely baffle me, daily. I am in a constant state of bafflement at BF HQ. In fact, Iâve never been more confused, day-in and day-out, in my life.â Itâs the most pathetic attempt at self-deprecation Iâve read since the transcripts of Stalinâs show trials.
A few months later, the dude got fired by his boss (15 years younger): âThis is just not working out, your stuff. Letâs just say, itâs âcreative differences.’â
Big companies are on notice that theyâre on the wrong side of employment law. They just donât care.
Slate reports: âIn 2011, Google reached a multimillion-dollar settlement in aâŚsuit with computer scientist Brian Reid, who was fired from the company in 2004 at age 54. Reid claimed that Google employees made derogatory comments about his age, telling him he was âobsolete,â âsluggish,â and an âold fuddy-duddyâ whose ideas were âtoo old to matter.â Other companiesâincluding Apple, Facebook, and Yahooâhave gotten themselves in hot water by posting job listings with ânew gradâ in the description. In 2013, Facebook settled a case with Californiaâs Fair Employment and Housing Department over a job listing for an attorney that noted âClass of 2007 or 2008 preferred.’â
Because the fines and settlements have been mere slaps on the wrist, the cult of the Youth Bro is still going strong.
To walk the streets of Austin during techâs biggest annual confab, South by Southwest Interactive, is to experience a society where Boomers and Gen Xers have vanished into a black hole. Photos of those open-space offices favored by start-ups document workplaces where people over 35 are as scarce as women on the streets of Kandahar. From Menlo Park to Palo Alto, token fortysomethings wear the nervous shrew-like expressions of creatures in constant danger of getting eaten â dressed a little too young, heads down, no eye contact, hoping not to be noticed.
âSilicon Valley has become one of the most ageist places in America,â Noam Scheiber reported in a New Republic feature that describes tech workers as young as 26 seeking plastic surgery in order to stave off the early signs of male pattern baldness and minor skin splotches on their faces.
Whatever you do, donât look your age â unless your age is 22.
âRobert Withers, a counselor who helps Silicon Valley workers over 40 with their job searches, told me he recommends that older applicants have a professional snap the photo they post on their LinkedIn page to ensure that it exudes energy and vigor, not fatigue,â Scheiber writes. âHe also advises them to spend time in the parking lot of a company where they will be interviewing so they can scope out how people dress.â
The head of the most prominent start-up incubator told The New York Times that most venture capitalists in the Valley wonât take a pitch from anyone over 32.
In early November, VCs handed over several hundred thousand bucks to a 13-year-old.
Aside from the legal and ethical considerations, does Big Techâs cult of youth matter? Scheiber says hell yes: Â âIn the one corner of the American economy defined by its relentless optimism, where the spirit of invention and reinvention reigns supreme, we now have a large and growing class of highly trained, objectively talented, surpassingly ambitious workers who are shunted to the margins, doomed to haunt corporate parking lots and medical waiting rooms, for reasons no one can rationally explain. The consequences are downright depressing.â
One result of ageism that jumps to the top of my mind is brain drain. Youthful vigor is vital to success in business. So is seasoned experience. The closer an organization reflects society at large, the smarter it is.
A female colleague recently called to inform me that she was about to get laid off from her job as an editor and writer for a major tech news site. (She was, of course, the oldest employee at the company.) Naturally caffeinated, addicted to the Internet and pop culture, sheâs usually the smartest person in the room. I see lots of tech journalism openings for which sheâd be a perfect fit, yet sheâs at her witâs end. âIâm going to jump off a bridge,â she threatened. âWhat else can I do? Iâm 45. No oneâs ever going to hire me.â Though I urged her not to take the plunge, I couldnât argue with her pessimism. Objectively, though, I think the employers who wonât talk to her are idiots. For their own sakes.
Just a month before, Iâd met with an executive of a major tech news site who told me I wouldnât be considered for a position due to my age. âAside from being stupid,â I replied, âyou do know thatâs illegal, right?â
âNo one enforces it,â he shrugged. Heâs right. The feds donât even keep national statistics on hiring by age.
The median American worker is age 42. The median age at Facebook, Google, AOL and Zynga, on the other hand, is 30 or younger. Twitter, which recently got hosed in an age discrimination lawsuit, has a median age of 28.
Big Tech doesnât want you to know they donât hire middle-aged Americans. Age data was intentionally omitted from the recent spate of âwe can do betterâ mea culpa reports on company diversity.
Itâs easy to suss out why: they prefer to hire cheaper, more disposable, more flexible (willing to work longer hours) younger workers. Apple and Facebook recently made news by offering to freeze its female workersâ eggs so they can delay parenthood in order to devote their 20s and 30s to the company.
The dirty secret is not so secret when you scour online want ads. âMany tech companies post openings exclusively for new or recent college graduates, a pool of candidates that is overwhelmingly in its early twenties,â Verne Kopytoff writes in Fortune.
âItâs nothing short of rampant,â said UC David comp sci professor Norm Matloff, about age discrimination against older software developers. Adding to the grim irony for Gen Xers: todayâs fortysomethings suffered reverse age discrimination â old people in power screwing the young â at the hands of Boomers in charge when they were entering the workforce.
Once too young to be trusted, now too old to get hired.
Ageist hiring practices are so over-the-top illegal, you have to wonder: do these jerks have in-house counsel?
Kopytoff: âApple, Facebook, Yahoo, Dropbox, and video game maker Electronic Arts all recently listed openings with ânew gradâ in the title. Some companies say that recent college graduates will also be considered and then go on to specify which graduating classesâ2011 or 2012, for instanceâare acceptable.â
The feds take a dim view of these ads.
âIn our view, itâs illegal,â Raymond Peeler, senior attorney advisor at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, told Kopytoff. âWe think it deters older applicants from applying.â Gee, you think? But the EEOC has yet to smack a tech company with a big fine.
The job market is supposed to eliminate efficiencies like this, where companies that need experienced reporters fire them while retaining writers who are so wet behind the ears you want to check for moss. But ageism is so ingrained into tech culture that itâs part of the scenery, a cultural signifier like choosing an iPhone over Android. Everyone takes it for granted.
Scheiber describes a file storage companyâs annual Hack Week, which might as well be scientifically designed in order to make adults with kids and a mortgage run away screaming: âDropbox headquarters turns into the worldâs best-capitalized rumpus room. Employees ride around on skateboards and scooters, play with Legos at all hours, and generally tool around with whatever happens to interest them, other than work, which they are encouraged to set aside.â
No matter how cool a 55-year-old you are, youâre going to feel left out. Which, one suspects, is the point.
Itâs impossible to overstate how ageist many tech outfits are.
Electronic Arts contacted Kopytoff to defend its ânew gradâ employment ads, only to confirm their bigotry. The company âdefended its ads by saying that it hires people of all ages into its new grad program. To prove the point, the company said those accepted into the program range in age from 21 to 35. But the company soon had second thoughts about releasing such information, which shows a total absence of middle-aged hires in the grad program, and asked Fortune to withhold that detail from publication. (Fortune declined.)â
EAâs idea of age diversity is zero workers over 35.
Here is one case where an experienced, forty- or fifty- or even sixtysomething in-house lawyer or publicist might have saved them some embarrassment â and legal exposure.
In the big picture, Silicon Valley is hardly an engine of job growth; they havenât added a single net new job since 1998. âBigâ companies like Facebook and Twitter only hire a few thousand workers each. Instagram famously only had 13 when it went public. They have little interest in contributing to the commonweal. Nevertheless, tech ageism in the tiny tech sector has a disproportionately high influence on workplace practices in other workspaces. If it is allowed to continue, it will spread to other fields.
Itâs hard to see how anything short of a massive class-action lawsuit â one that dings tech giants for billions of dollars â will make Big Tech hire Xers, much less Boomers.