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.
After his second brain freeze, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, 81, is prompting the question of whether he’s too old for the job. California Senator Dianne Feinstein and President Joe Biden, who both seem too long in the tooth for their jobs, highlight the possibility that we’re descending into gerontocracy.
Well, Mr. and Mrs. Biden, the holidays are over. You know, the holidays during which you were going to decide whether or not to run for reelection. So, what did you decide?
This being a democracy, we hope that you came down on the side of the 70% of voters who don’t want you to run in 2024. Even if that figure reflects the feelings of every single Republican (and it probably doesn’t), it includes a lot of Democrats too.
At your age, Mr. President, decision-making can take a little extra time. Let me help you weigh the pros and cons.
Pros: You get to try to beat Donald Trump again. You have some legislative achievements to brag about. You’ll make history as the oldest person to ever run and perhaps win.
Cons: You have low poll numbers—and we may be heading into a recession. You might lose, which would suck, especially if it were to Trump. The Hunter Biden laptop investigation could turn ugly, maybe even implicate you in criminal wrongdoing. You won’t be able to campaign from your basement this time; a real presidential campaign is grueling and you’ll be 81. Actuarily, there’s a strong chance you would die during your second term, elevating the deeply unpopular Kamala Harris to the Oval Office. She would tarnish your legacy and hurt the Democratic Party.
You’re still sharp enough to see the right choice.
Next up: what to do about the vice president?
With only 28% of Democrats saying they would vote for Harris in the 2024 Democratic primaries, she would be far from a shoo-in for the nomination, which ought to be a given for a sitting vice president. She was a terrible campaigner, I would say in the 2020 primaries, but she didn’t even make it into 2020. The former prosecutor, who still hasn’t worked to release the innocent Black men she sent to prison, could easily face a devastating, even lethal, primary challenge from the left.
Cutting Harris loose is the smart, arguably required, move. But she’s a woman of color. Sidelining her will look racist and sexist. The only way to ease her out of the race somewhat gracefully is to make it look like her idea. Convince her that her only future in politics is a humiliating defeat. Find her a soft landing: university president, NGO CEO, MSNBC anchor.
Being a lame duck won’t feel good. Run again or retire, Mr. President, you’re a lame duck either way. Republicans control the House, Democrats barely have the Senate, campaigning begins this fall. Legacy-defining legislation is in your rearview mirror.
What matters now is nominating the strongest possible person to run against the Republicans next year. The best way to accomplish that is to subject the contenders to trial by fire. The nominee must be battle-hardened in preparation for the general election.
2016 shows what happens when a candidate has the nomination handed to her by superdelegates, cheating, backroom deals, and other DNC shenanigans. Hillary Clinton was smart and experienced but also arrogant and entitled. And why not? The nomination was handed to her. If she’d gotten accustomed to having to fight for every vote, she might have felt the hunger and drive to campaign in Wisconsin in the general or refrained from insulting Bernie Sanders and his supporters.
Clear the field, stand aside and give potential contenders as much time as possible to fundraise and organize their campaigns. Mr. Biden, as eminence grise and de facto leader of your party, you can pressure the DNC and top Democrats to abolish what remains of the superdelegate system and scrupulously refrain from endorsing or criticizing any contender for the Democratic Party nomination for president. Progressive or liberal, let the best person win and lead the party you have served for a half century to a victory that will serve as a lasting legacy of your wisdom.
(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. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
In an age where political partisans pick and choose their own facts, we need a defender of reality who forces Republicans and Democrats alike to face up to the harsh truth.
The other day, I caught myself using the phrase “earn a living.” For the first time in my life, I questioned myself.
The idea that one must “earn a living” is the fundamental assumption of capitalism. When you stop to think about it, that’s some extreme libertarianism.
Americans are constitutionally guaranteed the right to speak freely, worship as they choose, purchase and own a firearm and keep their homes private from prying government officials. As important as these rights are, none are nearly important as the right to living. You can live without expressing yourself. Religions are fiction. We would be better off without guns.
Yet life itself, without which no other right is worth a damn, is not guaranteed.
We need a few things to keep breathing: clean water, food, shelter and medical care. Yet our society can’t even codify the government’s obligation to provide water. While some municipalities push liquid hydrogen oxide to our sinks for free — unless you count taxes — many others charge. Unless you earn that living to which you are not legally entitled, you die of thirst or are poisoned or starve to death or you die from exposure to the elements or you succumb to an injury or disease that science would have treated or cured.
When you think about it, and we mostly don’t, the gap between the system and our psycho-cultural wiring is a gaping chasm. Capitalism says you aren’t entitled to drink or eat or sleep inside or see a doctor, that you must somehow “earn” those privileges or die. But for hundreds of thousands of years before settled civilization 6,000 years ago led to the grain storage that fed a previously-nonexistent profit incentive, homo sapiens lived in clans of hunter-gatherers.
There are accounts of traditional societies abandoning the elderly or driving the infirm to ice floes. But there is also considerable evidence that early societies took care of those who couldn’t take care of themselves. Archaeological digs have unearthed broken bones that were mended by primitive medical means. Ancient people carried their elderly and sick on litters. Even now, in situations where human beings find themselves separated from civilization’s requirement that everyone pay for the most essential goods and services, the overwhelming tendency is to help one another without expecting remuneration. Parents not only take care of their own children, they pay for the privilege. After a plane crashes in the wilderness or miners are trapped underground or a pair of buildings are destroyed in lower Manhattan, accounts inevitably emerge of the survivors’ camaraderie and generosity.
It would take one hell of a sociopath for a survivor of a shipping disaster to deny a share of his sunblock or his extra hat to his fellows in a lifeboat. Yet we routinely conform to psychosis that violates the communitarianism that is central to the lifestyle of our species. Almost every day, I walk by a woman sleeping outside my apartment building; sometimes I give her money but not always. Except for the cat, the extra bedroom in my apartment remains empty, neat, useless.
I have “earned” a living, you see. She has not.
It is cold. At night, it’s in the 30s.
I don’t know why she sleeps outside. Is she mentally ill? Lazy? Addicted to drugs? Maybe it’s bad luck. She worked in a field that’s no longer looking for workers. I do know she’s cold and hungry.
Capitalism gives me permission not to care. I justify my callousness by judging her choices, none of which I know anything about.
But this is only the beginning of the brief against capitalism. Capitalist society not only denies the concept of a human right to the most basic elements of survival, it creates necessities that no one ever needed or thought about before in order to commodify them and coerce us into feeding these new profit centers.
Were we to advance to the moral heights of our ancestors of previous millennia and constitutionally guarantee that everyone would be fed and housed regardless of their willingness or ability to earn a living as do Congo and Pakistan, it would be a revolutionary political and ethical development.
Yet billions of people would remain deprived of the new necessities of the modern age. Whereas hunter-gatherers spent every waking minute near everyone they knew and loved, we require pricey communications networks in order to keep in touch with our friends and families. Perhaps you are reading these words when they were published, over a Thanksgiving weekend when millions of Americans were driving and flying to visit relatives—spending billions of dollars on gas and airline tickets.
Higher education has become an essential need as well. Before the first settlement in Mesopotamia, people proved their suitability for mating by exhibiting skills like hunting, sewing and cooking. In America today, millions of men remain involuntarily single because women are more likely to have a college degree; they refuse to date “down” to a guy with a GED. A four-year degree at a private college can easily run a quarter million dollars.
Not only do you have to earn a living, what it takes to live has never been more complicated or out of reach.
The country is rich. Not everyone must work. There is plenty to go around. Those who work must share. Socialism and communism are political structures designed to distribute that sharing.
Please retire the expression “earn a living.”
(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. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
Grover Cleveland beat Benjamin Harrison in 1884. The same men faced off in 1888, with the opposite result. A second rematch took place in 1892, and Cleveland was restored. If you died in 1892, you didn’t miss a thing during your first four years of death.
What could be drearier or more indicative of calcified politics, save for four consecutive terms of FDR?
Since Joe Biden’s milquetoast Democratism basically make him Hillary Clinton not-in-a-pantsuit, we now face the dreadful possibility of a third Trump run and a second Biden run that feels like his third. This could be a presidential campaign between two eldercoots we would have been better off never having seen run for, much less achieve, control of the executive branch in the first place. And it could happen all over again.
A Trump v. Biden rematch, of course, is the exact opposite of what we want.
Two years from now, on Election Day 2024, Donald Trump will be 78 and Joe Biden will be nearly 82. Nancy Pelosi will be 84. There’s nothing wrong with old age per se — wisdom, experience, blah blah blah — but Biden, 78 at the time, didn’t have the energy to run a full-fledged campaign last time. What is he going to do when he’s 82, campaign from someplace even more convenient than the basement of his house? Will he Zoom in from bed?
A nation with this many octogenarians at its helm feels more like the Soviet Union during the bitter-end pre-collapse 1980s (Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko all died in short order) or Zimbabwe at its most wildly dysfunctional at the conclusion of Robert Mugabe’s endless reign. A country doesn’t have to be governed by Millennials to be vibrant or successful. Too many young people in charge can lead to disaster — look at Twitter before Musk swept in. Still, a repeat contest between two incredibly old white guys is algorithmically engineered to generate a tsunami of apathy.
Nobody needs this retread. Well, Trump needs it; he thinks prosecutors will be reluctant to indict him for one of the myriad of crimes he has committed now that is a declared candidate for president, and he is right. But two-thirds of the voters, to the extent that they matter anymore, don’t want Trump to run again. Here, finally, we find bipartisan common ground: two-thirds of Americans also don’t want Joe Biden to run again!
True, they are different two-thirdses. But there’s overlap. Millions of Americans sing in perfect harmony that they want something or someone or two someones different. That has to count for something — even if it will take a week or two to tally in Arizona. A nation cries as one: Don’t run, baby, don’t run!
Like all politicians, Joe Biden says a lot of things that aren’t true. Unlike things that people actually want, like abortion rights and student loan forgiveness that he lies about, Biden is almost certainly lying when he says he’s running again. And most Americans believe and hope that he’s lying about that.
But he may be telling the truth.
Insanely.
Democrats lost the midterms. But they beat the point spread. So they’re declaring victory. Even as Biden goes from a Democratic House and Senate to a Republican House and Democratic Senate, he is upgrading his report card like a kid using a pencil to change a D to a B. After such a magnificent pyrrhic victory, maybe he really should run again! The New York Times and at least part of the White House staff seems to think his “victory” has earned him another shot at the White House. “[Biden] regularly notes that he is the only person who has ever defeated Mr. Trump, implying that he would have the best chance of doing it again,” the newspaper reports.
I don’t see the logic. Then, neither does Biden.
The United States has a pretty lame voter participation rate. In a country where it is already hard to convince people that they should care about politics and engage in the electoral system, nothing could be less exciting than recreating the 2020 presidential election—a race that only became exciting after Trump lost and tried to overthrow the government.
Which he did lamely. A younger despot’s putsch would have had more oomph.
But, as referenced above, Trump will stay in, do or die. He must, to stay out of prison. Perhaps Ron DeSantis or some other evil Republican will win the nomination instead. But right now, it’s Trump’s to lose.
Biden, therefore, is the only human who can spare us from the horror of a 2020 replay. If he really loves America, if he cares about the American people, he will do the right thing and refrain from running again.
Thus clearing the field for Hillary.
(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. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
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.
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Democrats need to stop playing cute about the president’s reelection plans.
Asked in March whether he’s going to run in 2024, Biden’s answer was, shall we say, less than unqualified: “The answer is yes, my plan is to run for re-election. That’s my expectation.” He added: “I’m a great respecter of fate. I’ve never been able to plan three-and-a-half years ahead for certain.”
Eight months and ten approval points later, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters: “He is [running]. That’s his intention.”
Weasel words like “expectation” and “intention” signal that Biden is sticking to the “alternative strategy” that The Politico revealed in December 2019: “quietly indicating that he will almost certainly not run for a second term while declining to make a promise that he and his advisers fear could turn him into a lame duck and sap him of his political capital.”
According to aides, Biden expected to be a “transitional” figure due to his age. The Politico piece quoted an unidentified advisor: “He’s going into this thinking, ‘I want to find a running mate I can turn things over to after four years but if that’s not possible or doesn’t happen then I’ll run for reelection.’ But he’s not going to publicly make a one term pledge.”
With an approval rating of 28%, Kamala Harris is not that running mate. She is the least popular vice president in the history of polling. But running again is unrealistic for the oldest president in history. He would be 82 years old when he runs again and 86 when he completes his second term.
An 86-year-old president today would be the third-oldest head of state on earth.
And Biden isn’t the sharpest 79-year-old. He is visibly infirm, gets easily confused and can’t be trusted to hold a traditional press conference involving an unscripted back-and-forth with members of the press corps.
Whether he knows it or not, Joe Biden will almost certainly not run for reelection. Political insiders know it. (“One Democrat involved in campaigns said they couldn’t think of a single person they had spoken to in the last month who considers the possibility of Biden running again to be a real one,” The Washington Post reported recently.)
Voters know it too: 54% of Americans, including 45% of Democrats, told an August Quinnipiac poll they don’t believe Biden will be a candidate in 2024.
Democrats should deep-six this absurd game of “who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” and admit the obvious truth. A man in Biden’s mental and physical condition at age 79 will not rally. He won’t get stronger by age 82, when he will be required to hopscotch the nation for a grueling series of campaign appearances and presidential debates, while simultaneously heading the federal government.
Credibility is the most valuable coin of the realm in politics. Anyone with a scintilla of common sense knows that Democrats are lying about Biden’s current fitness for office as well as his plans for reelection. There are lies and then there are lies that insult your intelligence; Trump’s ridiculous claim that Mexico would pay for his border wall stood apart from his other untruths.
It would be hard to overstate the brand damage caused by political messaging that doesn’t pass the smell test. “What [Biden] is saying publicly is what he firmly believes. There’s no difference,” former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell told The Washington Post. “He will not run if he feels he can’t do the job physically or emotionally.” Biden once had a word for this kind of playing-both-sides statement: malarkey.
“The message,” notes the Post, “is aimed in part at tamping down the assumption among many Democrats that Biden may not seek reelection given his age and waning popularity, while also effectively freezing the field for Vice President Harris and other potential presidential hopefuls.”
This strategy is misconceived. Harris is hobbled by her unpopularity. How can she intimidate potential primary challengers, much less clear the field? How can you freeze the field for Harris and someone else at the same time?
So the real question is about Biden. If he runs, the DNC will back him. Democratic candidates and donors are understandably reluctant to committing time and money toward 2024—something they need to begin now—if there’s a strong possibility that Biden will run. More candidates, running longer campaigns, improve the likelihood that the eventual nominee will emerge well-funded, seasoned and tough enough to face Donald Trump or another Republican.
There are, of course, costs and risks associated with exposing a sitting president as a lame duck. First and foremost would be Biden’s ability to push through major legislative initiatives. Which is why he should delay his admission that he plans to be a one-termer until after the passage of whatever is left of his Build Back Better social-spending bill next year. BBB is the last major law Biden will ever have the chance to sign; he’ll be a de facto lame duck anyway.
Congressional Democrats won’t like going into the midterm elections without a strong president, but they’re going to get shellacked no matter what. They can recover their losses in 2024 on the coattails of a presidential nominee made stronger by a vigorous primary battle and Biden’s willingness to step aside.
In any case, voters might give Democrats credit for being honest about the physical and mental health of the president, for being mature enough to prepare for who will follow Biden and for treating them like adults.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Order one today. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
Youth culture lives. But some women are aging against the machine.
It means more than you think.
Girls can go gray as young as age 13. Teens who go prematurely silver are abandoning what would have been the standard shame-based response of the past, racing to buy hair dye. Now gray-haired teens and twentysomethings are joining their black- and red-haired, blonde and brunette brethren—and what would have prompted stares a decade ago suddenly seems normal.
Letting natural silver and gray grow out predated the pandemic by several years, but what Glamour calls “the gray-hair revolution” exploded during the 2020 lockdown. “I do remember just feeling like that was a silly thing to be concerned about right now,” a 39-year-old Texas woman who’d previously dyed her mane every three weeks told The Washington Post. Countless women dye so often that they can’t imagine what natural would look like. “The curiosity took over. I think one of the things that has surprised me is that I actually like it.”
Inspired by the decade-long trend, Millennial women in their 20s and 30s who haven’t yet gone naturally gray have also adopted the “granny gray” look. In Manhattan, where I live, gray-haired young women are so commonplace that no one gives them a second glance. Ironically, these hairstyle Benjamin Buttons are using toxic chemicals to achieve a natural look.
Now the “grannycore” dress is all the rage. (Synonyms include grandma chic and an offense to the English language, grandmillennial.)
Anti-style has become high style. Young urban professionals are paying top dollar for long shapeless floral print dresses with prints reminiscent of a 1930s feed bag. Dorothea Lange meets Saks.
You don’t need a doctorate in cultural psychology to suss out the nostalgic impulse here. COVID-19 prompted numerous people to rethink their priorities, to opt out of the rat race. Millions are dropping out of the workforce; a job fair held at the Denver airport that expected 5,000 applicants only got 100. Millions more have moved from big cities to the countryside and there’s no sign they’re ever going back. College applications are way down, a trend driven by young men who fear graduating with a massive burden of student loan debt. Craving simplicity and comfort while saying goodbye to an increasingly cruel world, Americans want to get back to basics.
Old feels basic.
Of course, fashion is window dressing. Sure, you want to look like grandma. But would you hire her?
Silicon Valley, its major employers disproportionately populated by young CEOs, continues to maintain ageism as one of its core religious values. Discrimination against workers over age 35 is so rampant that an ad expressing a different sentiment made national news. “Unlike Silicon Valley, we do not discriminate based on age,” read an August listing for a senior software developer by a Chicago-based startup. “Experience matters. We hire old people. (And young people, too.)”
On the other hand, you might date grandma. 90% of men say they’d date someone ten years older or more.
Whether we’re paranoid or clearly recognizing objective truth, those of us in that Gen X never-sweet-at-any-age demographic spot suspect that Millennials aren’t merely ignoring us—we’re used to that—but are actively plotting our demise. If you’re over 40 these days, mass media doesn’t bother to cover the book you wrote, the band you sing for or the stuff you like to buy. This desire to look old, really old, significantly older than me at 58, serves as a can’t-look-away reminder that generational politics isn’t just personal, it’s familial.
Millennials are mimicking granny fashions. Who are grannies now? Not Gen Xers 15 or 20 years older than them. Today’s grannies are Baby Boomers—Millennials’ parents. It’s another example of “generational leapfrog,” the cultural phenomenon of memory-holing a generation by making whatever is cool, desirable, profitable, etc. the provenance of those who are younger and older—just not you.
Gen Xers have been generationally leapfrogged throughout their lives. They’ve never had and never will have a president of their own. They’ve never been the right age to appeal to employers who were always looking for older folks to be bosses and younger ones for entry-level positions. Their cultural icons are routinely snubbed and marginalized by cultural gatekeepers.
Now that Xers are middle-age, it’s cool to be old or to look old. Take this to the bank: once Gen X enters the real over-65 gray zone, calls to eliminate/privatize Social Security will return and mocking the elderly will again become de rigueur. No one will want to look, much less be, old.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Order one today. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
Everyone knows that Joe Biden is probably too old to be president. However, Democrats pointed out that he would have Kamala Harris to step in and spot him if he ever falls down on the job. Would you get on a plane with Joe Biden as a pilot?
