Biden Isn’t Just Too Old to Beat Trump. He’s Too Old to Govern.
The media’s obsession with surface over substance is part of the same dysfunction that has produced two completely incompetent candidates.
Watching the progressive media coverage following the legitimately surreal spectacle of Joe Biden’s debate performance I found myself noticing a pattern. Again and again the commentary focussed, not on the implications of this performance for him as president, but for him as candidate. Oh no, they all seemed to cry in unison, he’s gone senile and will never beat Trump.
Well, I found myself asking, what if he did? Then what? Then he could shit himself in the Oval Office while the lobbyists and their lackey technocrats run the country, and the world falls apart around him?
Then what? After four more grinding years of rule by the cancerous neoliberal blob which created the toxic climate in which Trump thrives, what new monsters can we expect to meet?
Having since conducted a careful review of the TV coverage I had already casually consumed — CNN, Breaking Points and DemocracyNow!, as well as some articles from the New York Times — one by the editorial board, one by Thomas Friedman, and one by Ezra Klein, I can safely say I wasn’t imagining it.
The overwhelming concern from these progressive pundits was with Biden’s ability to beat Trump, not with his ability to effectively govern once returned office. Their thinking only really extended as far as November, and was primarily concerned with who would be in the White House on day one.
No one asked, if he’s this bad now, how bad will he be at 86, after four more years as president?
The least bad were the Youtube channel Breaking Points, whose hosts raised concerns about Biden-the-demented-president five times, compared to ten mentions of concerns about Biden-the-losing-candidate.
The worst were The New York Times Editorial Board and The DemocracyNow! panel. Neither mentioned the problem of a geriatric president at all. Not even once.
Watching the DemocracyNow! segment was particularly saddening. Amy Goodman (67) was joined by Norman Sullivan (72). He’s the exectuive director of something called the Institute for Public Accuracy, whose website is, in 2024, still not optimised for mobile.
Seven times he stressed the importance of beating Donald Trump and/or his assessment that Biden didn’t have what it took to do that. Not once did he discuss the danger of having a visibly senile old man in charge of the most powerful and important military in the world, with his finger on the nuclear button. Nor did he consider Biden as an example of a broader problem of gerontocracy, of which his continued role as commentator is another example.
Also present on the call was Chris Lehmann, the DC bureau chief for The Nation. I wasn’t able to find his age on line, but he’s closer to Biden at 81 than he is to me at 40, (or the average US citizen at 38.5). He didn’t get as much time to talk, and when he did it was only direct commentary about Biden’s debate performance. But the headline of his post-debate editorial; “Biden’s Record Won’t Win Him the Election [my italics] if He Can’t Make Sense for 2 Minutes at a Time” makes it clear that his primary concern is, like his corporate colleagues, is not that Biden would be a bad president, but that people might realise how bad a president he would be, and collectively choose the only alternative — Trump.
The “alternative media”, as I say every chance I get, might be a different team to the “mainstream” but they are playing the same superficial sport.
The point I am getting at, the pain in my heart that compels me to write this, is hard to summarise. But the core of it is a deep disrespect for the public, which offends me.
These pundits ignore the root problem, that Joe Biden is incapable of doing the job, and the Democratic Party is incapable of reform. Instead they worry about the secondary problem, downstream, that the public might realise this, and act accordingly.
If Trump wins, and survives to the end of his second term, he will be a year older than Joe Biden is now. He might seem relatively lucid right now, but at such extreme ages, things can go downhill fast — as Biden’s rapid and now very public decline has demonstrated. If the problem is gerontocracy, Trump is a terrible solution. A so-called “hot swap” where Biden steps down and another candidate is chosen at the Democratic Convention, is a better one — and every pundit I encountered during my research for this story agrees.
But it probably won’t happen, and the reasons it won’t happen are the same reasons we have these shallow, superficial thinkers leading our public discourse.
Ezra Klein wrote, in his opinion piece, that there’s “no lack of talent or capacity in the Democratic Party”. But there is.
And there’s a lack of talent and capacity in the New York Times, too. Honesty is a discipline. It takes practice. Our intellectual class has practised the opposite, for at least for as long as I have been alive.
We — the post-industrial, democratic West — are at a low spiritual ebb. A reverse meritocracy prevails across politics, the media, and academia. How else do you explain this absurd spectacle, the second contest between two stupid, pathetic old men, for the most powerful, prestigious and important job in the history of the world?
Anyone with a glimmer of integrity or a spark of creativity is marginalised instantly, even at the lowest levels. Cynicism and hypocrisy rule. These elite actors, and many others beside, would probably scoff at such a statement, perceiving it as both pompous and naive — and that’s exactly the problem.
