What is Joe Biden good for?

 

Is Joe Biden too old to serve another term as president? The political media needed to goose eyeballs on its offerings, so we're having a round of this. The question might have seemed meaningful a year ago, but Prez Joe long ago decided he can and must run, so it strikes me as mostly noise. Besides, he's only three years older than Donald Trump -- and that guy is nuts, in addition to being corrupt and vicious. If there were a way to have two younger candidates, that would be good. It's time for a new generation. But there is no way this year. The mature thing is to get used to it.

James Fallows is only a few years younger than either of these gents, but he's been doing insightful political journalism since the Carter Administration. He doesn't think much of the too-old Joe meme: in fact, he thinks age may be an advantage in this president.

Why is Biden better as an old president than he would have been as a young one? Because experience, or luck, or Providence, has equipped him for the two essential aspects of the job (which, inconveniently, don’t make for great breaking-news coverage).

One of those is judgment. Not the second-by-second go/no-go decisions in the Situation Room that are glamporized in news accounts. They are part of a president’s responsibilities, but not the major part. The real test of a president is the larger strategic decisions, the ones that are pondered-over. We should draw a line and pick this fight. We should do our best to avoid this other fight.

I contend that Biden’s judgment on all of the biggest questions has been good. That is, I agree with most of his calls. The real point is that his judgment is probably better than it would have been in his 40s. And he is less anxious about “proving himself.”

The other is choosing a team. Every president of the past century, before Joe Biden, has had publicized scandals, staff resignations, back-biting, and other friction by this point in an administration. So far the only “scandal” involving Biden has concerned his son Hunter, who never held public office; and the main “criticism” from his own party has been whether Merrick Garland, his attorney general, has been too passive.

Choosing which fights to pick; choosing which people to trust: These are often the traits of older people, rather than younger ones. They’re strengths rather than weaknesses for Biden. Sidney Blumenthal has an extended argument about why Biden is the best choice for the Democrats—on the merits of his performance in office, and on the realities of choosing anyone else.

Washington Post opinion writer Perry Bacon Jr. also rose to the old-Joe prompt. I'd call his conclusion realistic.

I’m going to spend the run-up to the 2024 election being honest: Biden is a solid president but not indispensable; neither he nor Harris are transformative leaders like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.; Harris might end up in the job because Biden is so old.

If the fate of American democracy depends on pretending that we are not at all concerned about an 80-year-old-president, then we were already doomed. I can’t predict the future about Joe Biden’s health and I don’t need to — I will be voting for Joe Biden for president and also Kamala Harris for president if Biden can’t serve.

Seems sensible. The pair in power aren't perfect, but, as Biden always says, "compare him to the alternative." That's where we are.

The basketball great and wiseman Kareem Abdul-Jabar offers may favorite take on the Biden "age issue."

Age and experience can mean making fewer mistakes (because you’ve already made them). Maybe it also means delegating for higher efficiency. Maybe it means working smarter.

Having lived a lot of years doesn’t make you wise. It’s what you learned from all those years that makes you wise. Some are just as clueless at 90 as they were at 19. But others have filled their minds and hearts with knowledge and compassion worthy of a lifetime.

... Biden may drive the car more slowly, playing the oldies station, and with the blinker permanently on, but at least he’s driving in the right direction.

• • •

The discussion of Biden's age prompts me throw in a suspicion that's grown on me was I've watched this presidency.
 

I've come to think that one of Biden's assets as president is his very longevity in politics. This is not entirely that experience made him wiser, but because of the different contexts in which he followed his ambition. Biden came up before the "Reagan revolution." He grew up as a pol in a time when Democrats thought the New Deal, national mobilization to win World War II, and Lyndon Johnson's ambitious effort to cut poverty in the 1960s had set the paradigm for what government was for. Government's purpose was to make the lives of all citizens better -- safer, less precarious -- by targeted interventions in market capitalism. From 1933 through 1980, that's what ruling Democratic politicians thought was the job. 

Ronald Reagan's Republican Party tore all that down, promising less government, less regulation, less concern from the poor and the dark skinned. Businesses and white supremacists loved this government U-turn; the Dems were divided, exhausted, and took decades to recover both intellectually and at the ballot box.

Joe Biden comes from the before-Reagan times. His instinct is to use the power of government to do good things for people. He's surrounded by younger people very much of today: Sanderites, Warrenites, think tankers, all of whom have new, unfettered, ambitions for what a Democratic government can do. And climate crisis forces but also enables action; cautious incrementalism just won't serve.

So, as the historian Heather Cox Richardson explains, we get a government that tries of advance purposes which break from the premises of the last forty years.

The idea that public investment in infrastructure serves democratic goals fell out of favor in the U.S. in the 1980s. Leaders insisted that private investment reacted more efficiently to market forces whereas government investment both distorted markets and tied up money that private investment could use more effectively. In fact, the dramatic scaling back of public investment since then has not led to more efficient development so much as it has led to crumbling infrastructure and its exploitation by private individuals.

Joe Biden is a happy throwback to a different time. He can imagine government which is creative and agile -- and broadly good for everyone. A government that has our backs. Maybe we needed an old-timer leader in this moment ... anyway, we've got one.