Susan Walsh/AP Photo
President Joe Biden speaks at a campaign event at Bowie State University in Bowie, Maryland, November 7, 2022.
All things considered, I’m high on Joe Biden. He’s the first president since Lyndon Johnson who’s been serious about addressing economic inequality and—what was far less of a problem in the 1960s—mass wage stagnation. I was enthused that he took some of Bernie Sanders’s economic policies as his own and put a scaled-back version of them into his much-lamented Build Back Better bill. I consider his successes in enacting major legislation grappling with the climate crisis and boosting domestic industry to be historic achievements. I appreciate his skill at spearheading and keeping together the coalition of nations that are supporting Ukraine. Some of his appointees, particularly in agencies that are charged with promoting workers’ rights, have promoted them more creatively and effectively than any administration since FDR’s. I was no fan of his intervening to stop the railroad strike, but raisons d’état can compel a president to do that kind of thing, and as the above-mentioned FDR actually sent in the Army to break strikes in armament factories during World War II, I think historians will cut Biden some slack; they’ve cut it for FDR, in assessing his pro-labor bona fides.
I say all this as a prelude to the point of this On TAP, which is my belief that Biden should not seek re-election. Yes, I know that Biden’s suggestion (well, actually, diktat) to the Democratic National Committee last Thursday that they move South Carolina up to the head of the 2024 primary-election pack made clear his determination to run. Nonetheless, I hope we (you and me both) can convince him that running isn’t really a good idea.
The problem isn’t Biden as such, it’s simple chronology. Biden appears to be in pretty damn good shape today, but he’d be 82 if and when he takes the oath for a second term, and 86 when that term wraps up. Republicans are sure to run hard on that issue, which almost surely will be their only attack on Biden that will be empirically verifiable. Yes, I think Biden would be able to defeat Donald Trump despite those attacks, but I’m not sure he could defeat any of the younger GOP alternatives to Trump should one of them be nominated. I also strongly suspect that some nontrivial number of Americans who otherwise might vote for the Democrat in 2024 will be given pause by the thought of voting for someone who’ll be 86 at the end of his term. Let alone someone who might not make it to the end of that term.
Face it: Sometime between now and January 2029, when his second term would conclude, Biden might come down with an ailment that afflicts a statistically verifiable majority of American male octogenarians: death. Were that to happen, of course, Vice President Harris would move into the White House. If that were to happen, say, in the final year of Biden’s presidency, there would already be a crowded field, including Harris, vying for the 2028 nomination, and there’s a decent chance that Harris’s rivals would keep on vying. If that were to happen earlier in Biden’s second term, however, barring some immense scandal, I don’t think any Democrat would opt to wage a primary challenge to the first woman president, and a Black woman president at that.
The problem with that is it’s not at all clear that Harris would be a strong candidate in the 2028 general election. She could dispel some of my apprehensions by delivering a more stellar performance in (the Oval) office than she has thus far as vice president, but only some of my apprehensions, as the electorate’s readiness to elect a Black woman from liberal California, particularly after she’ll have been savaged by right-wing media, is, to put it gently, uncertain.
But don’t fret exclusively about a hypothetical 2028 election: I don’t doubt that Republicans will raise the specter of a Harris presidency when they raise doubts about Biden’s life expectancy in 2024.
OK, OK—Biden has already made his intentions clear. To which I can only respond: Say it ain’t so, Joe.
