The New York Times began with a story of several progressive sages who suddenly acknowledged what everyone had long known: Mr. Biden is the oldest incumbent President of the United States at the age of 79 and will be 82 when he ends his term. of.  It appears and is heard every now and then at its age.  This statement of the obvious has now moved along the line of the progressive media choir in the Atlantic, with a piece that affirms “Let me put it bluntly: Joe Biden should not be a candidate for re-election in 2024. He is too big ».

These stories treat it as a revelation, as if Mr. Biden suddenly showed a dramatic fall. The truth is that the President showed that he had lost a verbal, and perhaps a mental, step in the first debate of the Democratic candidates in 2019. It has not improved. The Democrats admitted it privately at the time, but rallied with him during the South Carolina qualifiers, when he appeared to be the only Democrat who could suspend Bernie Saunders’ candidacy and defeat Donald Trump. The rest of the campaign was a long apology for Biden’s strategy of curtailing his public exposure by campaigning in his Delaware basement. Covid-19 was the perfect excuse, and woe to any journalist who dared to ask if Mr. Biden was not the same man we knew as Vice President. The subject was taboo. This was one of the great free campaigns in history. Ronald Reagan’s age was the subject of media anxiety when he ran for president at the age of 69 in 1980. a joke about Mondale’s “youth and inexperience” in the next discussion. Gipper was three weeks before 78 when he left office, who was younger than Mr. Biden when he joined Oval. If the President is a candidate for a second term, he would be 86 years old on his last day in office. But Mr. Biden needed to defeat Mr. Trump, and so that whole age had to be ignored in 2020. Why the Democratic turn now? One obvious answer is that the president has fallen in the polls and his low turnout could cost Democrats control of Congress in November. The problem may not be the ideas of the party or the adoption of Saunders’ agenda by Mr. Biden, since he had fought as a moderate. The problem must be Mr. Biden. Suddenly she can not bear the burdens of the Oval Office that even younger men have aged. He can not support his ideas. He is overwhelmed by crises. You almost have to feel sorry for Mr. Biden, who saved his party from Mr. Trump, but is expendable now that he is politically responsible. You can almost hear Mr. Biden shouting to his staff: Where is the gratitude? Do you think Burnie or Mayor Pete would have beaten Trump? I’m the guy who saved democracy. Mr. Biden can be stubborn, and as anyone with older parents knows, removing their car keys can be a difficult discussion. The president may not want to leave the city as easily as some Democrats want him to. Much more so given the lack of obvious democratic alternatives to Biden in 2024. Vice President Kamala Harris would run in a millisecond, but nothing she has done or said since appearing on the national stage suggests she belongs to the presidency. . Democrats know this, which you can tell from all the stories earlier this year about its political struggles. This is Beltway’s confidential way of preparing the ground for other candidates to consider running. Not that Pete Buttigieg will need any consolation. That’s the price of Mr. Biden’s appointment with so little scrutiny over his presidency. Maybe the Democrats will avoid a clash in the midterm elections, or will gather after the election using a GOP Congress as foil. However, Democrats may want to start looking for candidates away from Washington if they want to keep the White House in 2024. Copyright © 2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8