By Jim Geraghty
Monday,
February 12, 2024
Late
last week, after President Biden’s disastrous prime-time press
conference, our Phil Klein delivered an assessment that sounded
insane . . . and yet, in light of recent events, deserves serious
consideration: “Democrats would be better off facing Donald Trump with [Kamala]
Harris as their presidential nominee than taking their chances with a rapidly
declining [Joe] Biden.”
I
can hear readers now: Harris is a joke, a liability, a walking disaster who is
so self-evidently a weak candidate and leader that not a single prominent
Democrat has called upon Biden to announce he’s serving just one term.
But
as these past few days have made abundantly clear, Biden’s age is the
single-biggest problem jeopardizing the Democrats’ chances of keeping the White
House. Never mind that a super-majority of Americans thinks
Biden is too old to serve another term; a super-majority of Democrats thinks
Biden is too old to serve another term, according to the latest polling from ABC News:
According to the poll, conducted using Ipsos’
Knowledge Panel, 86 percent of Americans think Biden, 81, is too old to serve
another term as president. That figure includes 59 percent of Americans who
think both he and former President Donald Trump, the Republican front-runner,
are too old and 27 percent who think only Biden is too old. . . .
73 percent of Democrats think Biden is too
old to serve.
This
is a problem that cannot be fixed. Biden cannot get younger. There’s something
a little sad about Democrats who think that the problem can be solved if the White
House and Biden campaign staff just put the president in front of the cameras
more:
Top party operatives are warning Biden aides
that the president cannot retreat in response to the special counsel report
that fueled concerns over his age and mental faculties. They say President Joe
Biden, having largely shied away from interviews and press conferences, needs
to be out in public far more.
They want to see him engage with the press
and voters in the off-script and punchy exchanges he’s been known for in the
past, which they believe will help chip away at concerns about the president’s
mental acuity. They say that it’s worth the risk of potential slip-ups that
could reinforce the image that he’s declining.
Why
do you think Biden’s public events are so few and far between, compared to a
normal president’s? It’s because he can’t do them. If you put Biden
out in public more, Americans are going to keep seeing what they’ve been
seeing. There is no sharper, quicker-witted, and more energetic Joe Biden
hiding behind the curtain, waiting for the right moment to emerge. What you see
is what you get.
Yes,
Harris comes with her own problems — plenty of problems — but
she would instantly nullify the age issue.
Democrats
are used to their nominee being the younger one, the fresher face, the
representative of change and progress — Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack
Obama. When Democrats have failed to win the presidency in the past generation,
they’ve usually had an older nominee. In 2004, John Kerry was 61. In 2016,
Hillary Clinton was 69. Democrats are used to painting Republicans as the old
fogeys who are out of touch. One of the reasons that the Biden era has been so
frustrating to Democrats is that this time, their guy is an
old fogey who is out of touch.
The
Democratic Party’s message would no longer be, “Trust us, Biden will still be
fine as president at age 86” but instead would be, “Hey, you know Trump would
turn 80 during his second term, right?”
Biden’s
age impedes his ability to communicate, and a presidential campaign is all
about communication. Everyone knows Biden is in no shape for three 90-minute
prime-time debates, and his allies are already talking about reasons why Biden should skip them —
lest they elevate Trump, of course.
Kamala
Harris is, at least to all appearances, a healthy 59-year-old woman. With
Harris as the nominee, you could do early morning events, late-night events,
multiple events per day, lots of travel — all kinds of things that have
disappeared from Biden’s schedule because of his age.
The
notion that Harris is even more unpopular than Biden is technically accurate,
but often overstated. In the FiveThirtyEight average, as of
this writing, 38.5 percent of the public approves of the job Biden is doing, and 37.5 percent approves of the job Harris is doing. (By contrast, 42.6
percent of the public has a favorable opinion of Donald Trump.)
Phil
writes:
Harris would go from being a sideshow act
defined by rambling and incoherent musings, to the first female president, and
the only one standing in the way of a Trump second term. Media would be replete
with profiles of the “new” and politically rehabilitated Harris.
I
would note that we’ve had a lot of “How Kamala Harris got her groove back” profile pieces and coverage over the last
three years, with no discernable change in public opinion of her. But with that
said, if Biden announced he wasn’t seeking another term, the glowing coverage
of Harris would reach saturation levels.
And
if 2024 is going to be a pure base-turnout election — certainly neither party
seems all that interested in appealing to independents and centrists anymore —
Harris’s loopy, off-the-cuff, Hallmark-card, haiku speaking style won’t matter
as much. She raises money, pounds the podium on abortion, and presses the
buttons for progressives in a way that Joe Biden can’t or won’t. Recast her as
Obama, cast Trump in the role of Mitt Romney or John McCain — an erratic
billionaire businessman who’s too old for the job — and roll the dice.
The
alternative for Democrats is to argue with that 86 percent of Americans that
Biden’s age isn’t a legitimate reason for concern, and to emulate Biden’s deputy campaign manager, Rob Flaherty, and
complain that the New York Times is demonstrating a pro-Trump
bias when it editorializes, “The president raised more questions about
his cognitive sharpness and temperament, as he delivered emotional and snappish
retorts in a moment when people were looking for steady, even and capable
responses to fair questions about his fitness.” Right, right, I’m sure you get
a lot of tough guys in red caps strutting through the hallways of 620 Eighth
Avenue shouting, “This is MAGA country!”
Cut
bait with Biden, nominate Harris, and have her select some normal, bland,
pleasant middle-aged white male like Colorado senator Michael Bennet or
Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro as her running mate. Yeah, that’s a bit of a
Hail Mary pass in presidential politics, but running it back with Biden in his
current state is even less likely to succeed.
Meanwhile,
on the Republican Side . . .
Republicans
shouldn’t feel thrilled about their likely nominee, either. Over the weekend,
at a rally, Donald Trump asked where Nikki Haley’s husband was. “Where’s her
husband? Oh, he’s away. . . . What happened to her husband? Where is he? He’s
gone.”
Michael
Haley is a major in the U.S. Army National Guard currently serving an
active-duty deployment as a staff officer in the 218th
Maneuver Enhancement Brigade in Djibouti in support of Operation
Enduring Freedom, Horn of Africa, you sleazy numbskull. Trump knows darn well
what he’s doing and what he’s implying: that there’s something mysterious,
nefarious, or unsavory about Michael Haley’s absence from his wife’s side.
Trump
also stated that as president, he would “encourage Russia to do whatever the
hell they want” to any country he felt hadn’t made sufficient financial
contributions to NATO:
DONALD TRUMP: And one of the presidents of a
big country stood up and said, well, sir, if we don’t pay and we’re attacked by
Russia, will you protect us? I said, you didn’t pay. You’re delinquent. He
said, yes, let’s say that happened. No, I would not protect you. In fact, I
would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You got
to pay your bills.
For
the millionth time, no country pays NATO dues, nor does the alliance charge any
bills to any member countries. NATO sets a threshold of appropriate defense
spending, at 2 percent of a country’s GDP. Eleven NATO members meet or exceed that threshold, and 19
countries fall short, from the 1.9 percent of GDP spent on defense by France to
the seven-tenths of one percent of GDP spent on defense by Luxembourg. (The
population of Luxembourg is smaller than that of El Paso, Texas; the country
has roughly 900 military personnel.) I get as irritated with
European allies who don’t pull their weight in defense spending as the next
conservative, but there’s something revealing about someone who seethes about,
say, Spain spending just one and a quarter percent of its GDP on defense, but
who can simultaneously shrug off Russian war crimes.
Finally,
Trump whined on Truth Social that Taylor Swift was somehow betraying him.
I signed and was responsible for the Music
Modernization Act for Taylor Swift and all other Musical Artists. Joe Biden
didn’t do anything for Taylor, and never will. There’s no way she could endorse
Crooked Joe Biden, the worst and most corrupt President in the History of our
Country, and be disloyal to the man who made her so much money.
He
is a rampaging narcissist, a black hole of desperate need for approval and
adulation who explodes in blistering rage when he doesn’t get it. And that’s
the most likely alternative to Biden, America.
ADDENDUM: Those of us who
can remember eight years ago may recall that former Virginia governor and GOP
presidential candidate Jim Gilmore received twelve votes in the 2016 Iowa caucus, out of
186,932 votes cast. Gilmore then chose to continue to compete in the New
Hampshire Republican primary — where he finished ninth out of nine major
candidates running, with 133 total votes and five one-hundredths of 1 percent
of the total vote.
This
weekend, Gilmore declared that it is time for Nikki Haley to admit defeat and
end her campaign.
“It
is time to unite the Republican Party, so we can begin the difficult, yet
necessary task of uniting the country,” Gilmore stated in a press release. “Prolonged disunity
helps no one, hurts everyone, and weakens our standing in the world. Americans
deserve better.”
Now,
there are a lot of people in this world who can tell Haley that her winning the
nomination over Trump is so improbable that it’s effectively impossible, that
she’s underperformed even modest expectations, and it’s time to end her denial,
acknowledge reality, and drop out of the race.
But
Jim Gilmore isn’t one of those people.
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