Portside

There’s a very real prospect that Americans will go to the polls in 2024 opposing the Republicans’ and supporting the Democrats’ positions—on abortion, increased domestic investment, fairer taxes, a modernized infrastructure, the climate crisis, public health, and a host of other issues—and nonetheless put a Republican (most likely, Donald Trump) in the White House.

If that happens, I suspect the reason will come down to Joe Biden’s age.

The Washington Post/ABC poll released over the weekend was something of an outlier in showing Biden trailing both Trump and Ron DeSantis by levels outside the margin of error. (The same poll showed that 66 percent of Americans opposed banning the abortion drug mifepristone, which should only intensify fears that the situation described in the preceding paragraph could come to pass.) Even if the poll’s sampling tilted a tad toward Republican voters, its findings on Biden’s weaknesses have to be taken seriously. Foremost among those is the fact that Biden would start his second term at age 82 and finish it at age 86, and the fact that he’s already showing his age—in no small part by not showing up very often. His is not a presidency of press conferences or speeches from the Oval Office, and if this cossetting spares him some gaffes by keeping him out of the public eye, it also, well, keeps him out of the public eye. Only 32 percent of poll respondents said Biden has “the mental sharpness it takes to serve effectively as president” and only 33 percent said he’s “in good enough physical health to serve effectively as president.” (I suspect these Biden doubters include those who may think he’s OK now but won’t be by 2028.) The 32 percent who say Joe’s OK doubtless overlap the 32 percent who said they would “definitely vote for Biden” when he was pitted against either Trump or DeSantis.

Biden, then, must enter the campaign with two objectives: The first, made clear by his frequent use of the word “freedom” in his announcement of candidacy, is to contrast the country over which he hopes to preside with the country where Republicans are busy stripping basic rights from women and will do more such stripping (of the right to vote, among other things) under Republican rule. The second is to make his case for freedom so forcefully that he dispels some of the doubts raised by his age—which he can only do by subjecting himself to the media and the public more than he has, and hopes that that works.

It may not. His responses to criticisms that he’s too old have sometimes sounded so querulous that they only confirm his critics’ apprehensions. Asked on MSNBC last Friday why, despite his age, he was the right person for the job of president, Biden answered, “Because I have acquired a hell of a lot of wisdom and know more than the vast majority of people.”

I doubt that’s what his inner circle suggested he say, but if they did, he needs a different inner circle.

Right now, the Democrats are drifting uneasily toward a waterfall and hoping Biden can somehow navigate the looming turbulence. By autumn, if he hasn’t had some measurable success in playing the freedom card, and in so doing allaying much of the public’s fears of a president drifting into senescence, then some prominent Democrat (a category that doesn’t include Robert Kennedy Jr. or Marianne Williamson) had damn well better enter the race.