Biden’s big problem? Your ageism. | Will Bunch Newsletter

Did anyone notice that I was gone for the last two weeks, including the lack of a newsletter on July 4? It’s not like I missed anything, other than a tragic mass killing in Philadelphia, a bizarre Moms for Liberty blowout, the state’s defunding of Temple and three other universities, and power outages for Wildwood and, occasionally, the Phillies’ offense. I’m not going to do that again, at least not for a few months.

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📮 There was a lot of response to my June 27 question about whether there should be an upper age limit for the presidency to match the lower age requirement of 35. I couldn’t agree more with most of the answers: that there’s no need for a hard-and-fast limit, just common sense from voters. “It’s scary to think a [bat guano] crazy Republican that is 52 years old could win an election simply because the most qualified Democrat was unable to run because of his or her age,” wrote Terry Snyder. Beth Lander said, “there should be transparency regarding the health, mental and physical, of the office holder. I still get PTSD from thinking that Nancy was actually running the country during Reagan’s last year or so in office.”

This week’s question: Should the U.S. go all out in aiding Ukraine, even if that means sending widely banned weapons like cluster bombs, or does it make sense to show some moral restraint? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer.

The website Axios published something of a mini-scoop — emphasis on the word “mini” — about President Joe Biden’s behavior behind closed doors, where he reportedly can display an explosive temper that is nothing like his avuncular public persona.

According to Axios’ sources, POTUS 46 has been known to erupt at aides or during briefings with phrases like — and I’m doing some major rewriting here, to satisfy my family-oriented Inquirer editors — “Gosh darn it, how the heck don’t you know this?!” “Don’t freaking baloney me!” and “Get the lovemaking out of here!”

Is this really news? If I were Joe Biden, I’d be, um, freaking furious right now, and here’s why.

With a few stumbles — some moral and some actual — along the way, Biden has largely delivered on his 2020 campaign promises in a way that no president has since, arguably, Ronald Reagan (and a lot of Reagan’s promises were bad). The centerpiece of the Democrat’s winning record has been his economic policies, crafted after a COVID-19-driven recession and so successful that the administration is positively branding them as “Bidenomics.”

Nearly two-and-a-half years in, Team Biden has brought joblessness to the lowest levels since the 1960s, and most Americans have experienced real wage gains, with the biggest boost, for a change, for those at the bottom of the economic pyramid. Inflation, a global phenomenon largely triggered by the pandemic and war in Ukraine, is annoying, but lower in the United States than other developed nations. And three major pieces of bipartisan legislation initiated by Biden — dealing with infrastructure, computer chips, and clean energy — are ensuring a new wave of jobs for blue-collar workers without college degrees.

That alone would make the case for a second term, but there’s more. Dealt a difficult hand in Ukraine, Biden has somehow walked the tightrope of managing a coalition to back Volodymyr Zelensky’s democratic government and resist Russia’s aggression, while avoiding World War III. It’s a remarkable contrast from the certain disaster if Vladimir Putin fanboy Donald Trump had won a second term. Instead, Trump is facing the steady drumbeat of prosecution, and some of the worst threats to U.S. democracy are diminishing in this Biden era.

I report this as a lifelong critic of Biden — he was nearly my last choice among the Democrats at this time four years ago — who’s found some real nits to pick with his presidency, including his border policies, his mixed messages on fossil fuels, and, now, his unconscionable decision to ship cluster bombs to Ukraine. But I’ve seen enough presidents in my lifetime to look at the big picture, and with his successful focus on jobs at home and beating back autocracy abroad, Biden’s presidency is on the Franklin Roosevelt track.

So why, then, are Biden’s poll numbers closer to Richard Nixon at the depth of the Watergate scandal? Actually, the president’s support has ticked up slightly from its all-time low in the well-regarded Gallup Poll, bottoming out at just 37% this spring to a recent resurgence to 43%. But his numbers remain badly underwater with critical independent voters. And polls show a rematch with Trump — who’s been indicted twice this year and faces two ongoing probes around his efforts to overturn Biden’s election — is a dead heat.

As Biden apparently might say, “What the [heck] is going on?”

Look, we all know there’s a huge chunk of America — almost every Republican, and a lot of independents, in an era of “negative partisanship” — who wouldn’t vote for Biden if he invented an ice cream cone that cures cancer. They hate what they think Biden and the people around him stand for, like the notion that the government consults with *experts* who want to force *science* around infectious diseases down your throat.

The one dark cloud over “Bidenomics” — the inflation that’s raised prices at the supermarket — is the worst problem, politically. It matters little that, on average, wage growth is slightly outpacing price increases. As several pundits have noted, the average worker believes they got a raise because they earned it. But $5 bacon is Joe Biden’s fault.

But let’s get real. We all know that Biden would likely be cruising toward a second term if he wasn’t the first president to turn 80 in the White House, and without the awareness that he’ll be 86 when the next term ends in January 2029. In fact, people aren’t shy about admitting this. In 2020, nearly a third of U.S. voters said they would not support a “well-qualified” candidate over the age of 70 — that is, 10 years younger than Biden is now. In May, 68% of all voters said they believe Biden is too old to serve a second term.

But is he? Some of the objections around Biden serving into his mid-80s seem largely based on actuarial tables, and some of it is based on his penchant for awkward public speaking — sometimes mush-mouthed, sometimes punctuated by verbal gaffes like the other day when he said “Iraq” when he was clearly talking about Ukraine. That’s enough to disqualify Biden, even for some folks who applaud his presidency. “Americans owe him a profound debt of respect and appreciation,” wrote Eliot A. Cohen in the Atlantic before urging the president not to run in 2024 because Cohen said he himself is losing a step and starting to forget stuff in his late 60s.

As Biden himself is wont to say, this is malarkey. Yes, sometimes a politician like Sen. Dianne Feinstein ages out of the job — after she missed months of votes due to illness and seemed confused about basic reality. But Biden, as I write this, is jetting around Europe at all hours, keeping to a grueling schedule, as he’s done now for 30 months.

True, Biden isn’t nearly as good at the performative parts of the presidency as the former actor Reagan, who always hit his marks and exuded confidence, even as he experienced actual memory problems behind the scenes. A lot of voters want that in their commander-in-chief: a performer. Biden is only good at the parts of the American presidency envisioned by the Founders: Setting an honest, high moral tone and hiring the right people to carry out that vision. Let’s get real: No one is sending ammunition to Baghdad instead of Kyiv because Biden uttered the wrong word, but there are too many voters who would use that as an excuse to replace him, even when that replacement might be a fascist.

In a recent op-ed about Biden and ageism, University of Southern California professor Shaun Harper asked, “because of his age, does Biden often miss or fall asleep in meetings, has he been unable to travel domestically and internationally to execute his responsibilities, are cabinet members and others in the White House complaining that he moves too slowly on getting things done, is he stuck in the past and only surrounding himself with other people his age, was he out of work for extended time periods after falling off his bike and tripping on a sandbag … did 58-year-old House Speaker Kevin McCarthy just wear him out in the debt ceiling negotiations, and does his behavior pose a credible threat to national security? The answer to each of these questions is no.”

Exactly. Biden’s biggest problem isn’t his performance in the Oval Office as much as our ageism. We should be judging him on the reality of how he’s doing his job, not our muddled feelings about growing older. Let’s elect a president in 2024 on the content of their character, and not on a calendar.

Question: Will PA government ever get a budget? — Via Fletcher McClelland (@mcclelef) on Twitter

Answer: Fletcher, I’m going to assume your question is about the mess in Harrisburg and not the Palestinian Authority, in which case the answer is not as soon as either Gov. Josh Shapiro or the Pennsylvania public would like. The complicated backstory is that Shapiro has signed a budget for the new fiscal year, but he only got that deal through the GOP-led Senate with a $100 million school-voucher program; when the (barely) Democratic-controlled House balked, the new governor pulled a 180 and struck the vouchers from the final measure. Furious GOP senators won’t return to sign the final bill, nor are they eager to pass the enabling bills to make some of its programs a reality. It’s a mess which I think a) shows a lack of experience and overconfidence on Shapiro’s part, and b) the ridiculous clout in Harrisburg of billionaire donor Jeff Yass, whose demands for vouchers — a completely counter-productive program — are behind this mess.

We’re at a stage in the development of the United States where every four years comes “the most important presidential election in American history,” since we seem to be just one election away from the end of functioning democracy. That’s because we are split right down the middle — not so much as Republicans and Democrats, but as a mostly educated class that believes in things like science and counting votes, albeit sometimes too arrogantly, and a rival class that’s been shut out of opportunities and is ready to believe the worst, even — or especially — when the worst is utterly ridiculous misinformation.

It’s becoming clear that 2024 is “the misinformation election.” President Biden’s main Democratic challenger is not someone offering policy alternatives but rather an alternative reality, where vaccines destroy lives instead of saving them and infectious disease science is an elite conspiracy. The GOP primary field is comprised of candidates who aren’t sure if the guy with 7 million more votes won the 2020 election. Meanwhile, a Donald Trump-appointed judge has effectively barred the Biden administration from addressing online misinformation, in the alleged interest of free speech. That leaves only the news media as a gatekeeper — and the news media is failing.

Over the July 4 weekend, Secret Service agents claimed they found a dime-sized bag that later tested as cocaine at a White House location used as the start of public tours. According to Occam’s razor — the best explanation is the most obvious one — the bag was ditched by a panicked tourist. As a news story, it should have been the end of the hour on a slow news day, Instead, the story produced a coke-fueled orgy of cable news coverage, featuring a White House press briefing where the first dozen or so questions were about the baggie — until someone finally asked about threats to a Ukrainian nuclear reactor. To the conspiracy-minded half of the electorate, this irresponsible coverage only fueled a raft of theories that the cocaine was some kind of indictment of the morality of the Biden family, maybe linked to the president’s son, a recovering addict.

Nothing will do more to aid democracy going into 2024 than the miracle of a Beltway press corps that learns how to quash conspiracy, rather than encourage it. The early indications are terrible, and it’s not just the cocaine nothingburger story. The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd — who wasn’t wrong that style matters, but who is horribly wrong to put style over substance — decided this week that the deeply personal “scandal” of Hunter Biden’s non-relationship with his out-of-wedlock child matters more than the looming scandal of authoritarianism for 330 million of us. America will never beat back the fascist inferno of misinformation and innuendo with a press corps that’s putting out fire with gasoline.

“IT HAS been yet another week of extraordinary weather. Torrential rainfall caused chaos across the UK. A record-breaking heatwave drifted across the US, broken by freak thunderstorms that left a trail of destruction from Chicago to Washington DC. Meanwhile, in India and Bangladesh more than 100 people were killed and half a million fled when the monsoon arrived with a vengeance.” That’s a quote from Britain’s New Scientist magazine that I spotlighted in my Attytood blog on July 11, 2012 — even though it sounds like it was ripped from this week’s headlines. In the early 2010s, however, it was still something of a shock to see years of climate predictions start to become a reality, and deniers continued to deny. Today, from sweltering Phoenix to waterlogged Vermont, we watch the effect of a dozen years of inaction since I posted a rare non-sarcastic blog headline: “NOAA links extreme weather to climate change.”