The debate about Joe Biden's age is getting really old
Efforts to persuade the Democratic Party to somehow replace Biden are not only counter-productive but deeply perverse
This piece was originally published at The Hot Screen.
Special counsel Robert Hur’s report on Joe Biden’s handling of classified materials may have exonerated the president on the merits of the case being investigated, but Hur sparked a fresh round of “Biden is too old” frenzy with his disparagement of Biden’s memory and age. An explosion of articles in mainstream papers like the New York Times and opinion pieces across the spectrum seized on Hur’s remarks, igniting in turn a self-perpetuating round of worries among Democrats and glee among Biden’s opponents.
Voters have expressed significant concerns in multiple polls about Biden’s age, which should surprise no one; he’s our oldest president, and has showed signs of physically slowing down over the course of his administration. Perceptions are certainly also not helped by the fact that Biden has always been a politician who tended to the verbal garble and gaffe, magnified by a stutter that he still contends with, so that what would before have been ascribed to Biden just being Biden is now ascribed to not only physical but mental decline. On the right, it’s an article of faith that Biden is senile and doddering; across the rest of the political spectrum, Biden is absorbing the understandable anger and anxiety of people who hate Trump, not Biden, but fear that Biden will be the unwitting agent of Trump’s return to the presidency. Biden may also be drawing the anger and anxiety of an American public that fetishizes youth, and that gives little quarter to anyone reckless enough to remind them of their own inevitable aging and decline.
But as a messy and caustic debate rages over whether President Biden should decline to run for re-election due to disqualifying physical and mental infirmity, all parties truly interested in a reasonable discussion should think hard about what sparked this latest round of Biden-bashing — NOT a decisive new poll or indisputable act of mental incompetence by the president, but a shard of propaganda launched into the public realm by a partisan Republican special counsel who abused his power by pairing an exculpation of Biden with a baseless character attack in areas he is not fit to judge. In other words, the media and too many Democrats have let themselves get played by something of a GOP psyop, ignoring the fact that Hur’s assessment of Biden’s memory and mental state are the non-professional judgment of a single partisan figure. His bad-faith behavior has been taken up in seemingly blind good faith by far too many, certainly by many who should know better.
Nonetheless, here we are. So what to make of the contention that Biden should step down and let someone else take his place? For my money, New York Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein’s recent audio essay arguing for this course of action is the strongest of this recent lot, a well-meaning attempt to grapple with concerns about Biden’s age and conceive of a way forward; it’s anchored in the unimpeachable position that Donald Trump must be defeated in 2024, and authored by a thoughtful, low-drama thinker who doesn’t have a particular axe to grind vis-a-vis internal Democratic Party politics. The furious backlash to Klein’s piece by those who disagree speaks to the punch it could potentially add to the dump-Biden campaign — but also indicates a solidifying consensus among defenders of the president that Biden is being unfairly maligned and that there is no surefire way for him to be replaced even if that were his own wish.
For a thorough dissection of the problematics of Klein’s piece and the larger Biden replacer movement, I would point readers to the latest podcast of Is This Democracy, hosted by political scientist Liliana Mason and historian Thomas Zimmer, as well as a companion piece by Zimmer at his blog Democracy Americana. Here, I’d like to zoom in on what I find to be the most glaring issues with this effort, starting with Klein’s exemplary piece, and conclude with where I’ve ended up after processing various “dump Biden” arguments over the last few weeks.
Klein’s argument repeats a familiar trope: that even if President Biden is in fact capable of being president — and Klein concedes that he is — what is truly dangerous to his prospects are public perceptions of his age and debility. On its own, though, this seems hardly damning, in that it actually opens the possibility of a course correction: Biden could get out in public more often, even acclimate people to his gaffes, as some have argued, in order to show he’s still got the right stuff. The question of perception is interesting, because it leaves open the possibility that it can be remedied, at least to some extent; conversely, it raises the deeply disturbing possibility that Biden should be discarded not because of actual incapacity, but due to his inability to project competence. Again, though, this seems like something well within the world of fixing by Biden and his team.
At this point, though, Klein presents an intriguing twist: the main problem is not that Biden cannot serve as president, but that he’s not sufficiently capable of running a presidential re-election campaign, due to his advanced age. At first blush, this seems to be a distinction worth digging into. After all, a presidential campaign is a highly public phase for a politician, at times filled with long days, travel, and the need to enthuse one’s supporters. Yet I’m hard-pressed to see this as a critique meaningfully distinct from the basic one that Biden should not be president due to public perceptions of his weakness. For instance, Klein cites two presidential campaign speeches, one recent and the other four years in the past, as evidence that Biden’s energy and self-presentation have diminished markedly. However, contending that Biden is slower and less energetic today is still not the same as saying that he should not run for president, but merely reopens the initial question of public perception regarding his ability to be president; saying he can’t campaign well doesn’t fundamentally change that this is a question of how people perceive Biden.
It’s telling to me that Klein elides a point that weighs heavily in Biden’s favor and that also undercuts the “not able to campaign for president angle”: Joe Biden is already president, with all the relative benefits of the position. Unlike his likely opponent, Joe Biden is currently gainfully employed in the very position he seeks to hold for another term. There’s a reasonable case to be made that part of how an incumbent president campaigns is to continue doing his job as president; at a minimum, his current job responsibilities reduce the amount of time Biden both can and should be rushing around the country campaigning as the election gets into full swing. As the incumbent, Biden might be blamed for things going wrong on his watch, but occupying the presidency also grants its own sense of legitimacy and continuity — the basic advantages of incumbency.
Ignoring Biden’s current position as president also lets us ignore the contrast that will exist between Trump and Biden as the campaign gets underway. Trump will (energetically enough) be saying hateful, anti-American things at rallies to incite his base not simply into voting for him, but to be ready to take violent action should he lose. While I, too, would love a more energetic Biden, his calm and sober conduct in the coming months may well work to his advantage against the increasingly erratic, if admittedly frenetic, displays of Donald Trump. As Simon Rosenberg succinctly puts it, “Trump is campaigning from the courthouse this time, not the White House.” Biden, in stark contrast, is indeed campaigning from the White House.
I’m also not really buying Klein’s suggestion for how Democrats can move beyond Biden: first, have close allies convince him not to run; and second, decide on his replacement at the Democratic convention. Plenty of people have already made hay of both suggestions (Jamelle Bouie has a gentle dissection of how Klein is way too optimistic about how an open Democratic convention would go that’s well worth a read), so I won’t pile on here, except to highlight a couple points that have been underplayed in the critiques. First, it seems to me that a spring and potentially early summer filled with news stories about efforts to get Biden to step down, all while Biden should be expected to be campaigning, would provide a deeply muddled and demoralizing message both to the Democratic base and to those who might otherwise be persuaded to vote Democratic. Putting aside whether such an effort would even be viable, Klein seems to badly downplay the damaging passage of wasted time. Similarly, waiting until August to choose a Democratic candidate would put the Democrats at a deep disadvantage, seeing as Trump would until that point effectively have run unopposed, with all the ability to gain momentum and set the agenda that such a vacancy would enable.
There’s been a lot of commentary about how very haywire a Democratic convention might go, with multiple candidates vying for the presidency in a crazily compressed time period, but the key point that leaps out at me is that whoever emerged would be deeply plagued by credible claims that he or she lacked democratic legitimacy (a point Bouie rightly makes in the critique I noted above). Though Klein may be technically correct that primary voters are electing delegates pledged to a candidate, and who can be freed to vote for someone else if that candidate drops out, the whole point of the primary reforms that occurred after the debacle of the Democrats’ 1968 convention was to move towards a system where voters had much more say in who the presidential candidate would be.
Simply put, Democratic voters have a very reasonable expectation that their presidential candidate will be the person who receives the most primary votes. To strip away that assumption and that approach, and to return to a system easily characterized as backroom deals and power plays, seems highly risky — and, as has been said by others already, is a really bad look for a party that claims the mantle of democracy. This is not to say that such a convention wouldn’t be balls-to-the-wall exciting for political junkies, the political press, and some segment of the public, but this would come at the price of a candidate who had likely received practically no votes, and at the risk that the compromises necessary would result in both a milquetoast candidate and upwards of a dozen disappointed also-rans. Could it work? Sure. But is the risk of disaster too high? The Hot Screen avers fuck yes.
I sympathize with the spirit behind Klein’s excitement about an open Democratic convention. I think it speaks to a wish for a reset, a way to leapfrog past the complexities of the Democratic coalition that have led to this place where the future of the party, not to say American democracy itself, rests on an octogenarian who’s behind in the polls and fills many Americans with doubts. Klein is entirely correct to point to the up-and-coming younger politicians who could run for president now.
But I have to say that after sitting with this debate for a good long while, and reading through arguments like Klein’s, I’ve come around to feeling like efforts to persuade the Democratic Party to somehow replace Biden are not only counter-productive but deeply perverse. They give primacy to polls about an election that is still many months away, and just as dubiously, downplay or ignore Joe Biden’s significant achievements over the past three years. For me, the following are some of the most noteworthy achievement and acts that point to a president fully engaged with the challenges that the U.S. faces: the passage of meaningful climate legislation; infrastructure spending that will boost the US economy for years; efforts (however undermined by a right-wing Supreme Court) to mitigate the crushing student college debt burden; the decision to back Ukraine against Russia’s invasion (a struggle which I increasingly believe will be seen as one the defining fights of our era); the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan (completing a process begun by his predecessor and putting a well-deserved end cap on two decades of the insanely conceived War on Terror); and a concerted effort to integrate progressive priorities into his agenda in a way that has helped strengthen the Democratic coalition.
I think it’s also reasonable to remember that since the Republicans gained control of the House in the 2022 midterms, meaningful legislation has become a pipe dream, as GOP representatives are overtly acting at the behest of Donald Trump to ensure that solvable problems fester. Is that really Biden’s fault, or is yet another sign that the nation is under assault by a radicalized GOP that places the goals of returning an authoritarian to power over the most basic notions of the public good? We keep hearing that Biden is not getting credit for his accomplishments, but it seems to me that if Democrats were to run another candidate out of the blue, it would cement the idea that Biden, and the Democrats, have not done much of anything over the last 3 years, which is not only totally wrong but a pretty stupid strategy for the party. It puts me in mind of Al Gore’s doomed 2000 campaign, in which his efforts to distance himself from the Clinton administration of which he was a part undercut his ability to point to his executive experience as a reason to vote for him. In major ways, bumping Biden off the ticket would seem to constitute an undeserved validation of the Republicans’ efforts to derail governance over the last couple years, and to unnecessarily memory-hole the president’s substantial accomplishments. That sounds like a strategy of panic and fear, not confidence and righteousness.