Cup of Joe
Hope is not a strategy. Democrats need something bolder.
Democrats had a smidge of good news through the Great New York Blizzard of 2024. Former Congressman Tom Suozzi—who resigned after three terms in the House of Representatives to run for governor in 2022—reclaimed the Long Island seat he vacated, which was subsequently won by fabulous fabulist George Santos. With Santos’ expulsion from Congress, it was up for grabs.
So, yay? Kinda. More like a tiny break in the storm that will rage for the next nine months unless Democrats—or Joe Biden—do something totally unexpected. Because all anyone here can talk about is Biden’s age and mental acuity, and there really aren’t any decent options for the Democratic Party to get out of the mess it’s in.
But let’s back up a bit, because Suozzi’s win is worth examining in the context of where the nation stands. First, it was a seat held by a Republican, so it’s a flip. Second, Suozzi ran as a moderate Democrat—pro-choice and pro-Israel, but calling for action on immigration. No overly woke rhetoric, just a solid appeal to the electoral center. And third, it continued the trend of significant Democratic wins since the Supreme Court in June 2022 decided women don’t have the right to control their own bodies. As a roadmap for victory later this year, it was clear as day.
Which gets us back to Biden. In an objective world, this year’s presidential election would be a 50-state sweep: US economic growth has led the developed world, unemployment remains at historic lows, inflation has fallen dramatically after rising largely due to exogenous factors. Biden has revived the country’s manufacturing sector and poured money into long-neglected regions, passed an infrastructure bill, jump-started the clean energy sector. He’s committed to democracy, isn’t threatening to let Vladimir Putin invade NATO countries, and isn’t facing 91 indictments. And he’s not Donald Trump.
But … I noted all of this four months ago, and ended by warning “Democrats need to be careful” assuming the nation will vote for the adult in the room. The problem? The adult in the room has a huge and growing perception problem around his age, which was unprofessionally spanked by a Republican special counsel last week who described the president as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” who had “diminished faculties in advancing age.”
Unprofessional doesn’t mean inaccurate, though. Jon Stewart returned to the anchor desk at The Daily Show on Monday, and immediately drew liberal ire for daring to state the obvious about Biden, even if he noted the same about Donald Trump.
“These two candidates, they are both similarly challenged,” Stewart said. “And it is not crazy to think that the oldest people in the history of the country to ever run for president might have some of these challenges. What’s crazy is thinking that we’re the ones, as voters, who must silence concerns and criticisms. It is the candidates’ job to assuage concerns, not the voters’ job not to mention [them].”
Yet the general approach of people who should know far, far better is to hope for the latter. The thinking among Democratic powerbrokers seems to be: there’s nothing we can do to stop Biden running for re-election, so now we have to hide him away, help him from hurting himself, and cross fingers he doesn’t implode on the rare occasions we can’t avoid exposing him to scrutiny.
That’s exactly what happened on Friday, when Biden went on the offensive to rebut the special counsel’s report only to mistakenly call the Egyptian leader the president of Mexico. That appearance was apparently demanded by Biden—the White House wanted to squirrel him away. And, while it backfired, I’m sympathetic to the political impulse.
That’s because it’s the best of three choices, and only two of those choices are plausible. Option A is the fever dream of many Democrats: that Biden looks back on his tenure, takes the win, and recognizes the unique opportunity he has to seal his legacy and the short-term future of American democracy. He addresses the nation and declares he is not running for reelection, instead passing the torch to a new generation of leaders. Polls the next day would see any generic Democrat trouncing Trump by at least 10 points. The hitch is that willingly walking away from being the most powerful person on the planet isn’t easy, and Biden isn’t budging.
That leaves two options. The first is what Democrats have attempted for the past four years: hide Biden away. That worked in 2020 when COVID was ravaging the planet and Biden could easily avoid public scrutiny. But the approach has persisted, with the president conducting far fewer interviews and press conference than his predecessors and even last week skipping the traditional soft-ball Super Bowl interview for the second straight year.
The jury’s already in on this plan: it ain’t working. The vacuum Biden is leaving is being filled by crazy right-wing conspiracies, and his absence puts immense pressure on the rare occasions when he does appear—to the point where an entirely lucid and forceful press conference going into granular detail about events domestic and international is entirely undone by the word “Mexico.”
Which leaves option three: let Joe be Joe.
People forget that Biden was a gaffe machine well before anyone speculated about the impact of age (he would even joke about it himself). And while his stutter remains tricky for him to navigate and there’s also no denying age has slowed him, no one at this point expects Biden to start acting and speaking like a man half his age. What we want is reassurance a decent man is doing all he can and, as The Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg wrote last week, “the bar for Biden has been set so laughably low that he can’t help but vault over it simply by showing up.”
“As Slate observed in 2008, the frequency of Biden’s rhetorical miscues helped neutralize them in the eyes of the public,” Rosenberg said. “In 2024, Biden will have an assist from another source: Donald Trump. Among other recent lapses, the former president has called Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán “the leader of Turkey,” confused Nancy Pelosi and Nikki Haley, and repeatedly expressed the strange belief that he won the 2020 election. With an opponent prone to vastly worse feats of viscous verbosity, Biden can’t help but look better by comparison, especially if he starts playing offense instead of defense.”
As things stand, the Democrats’ strategy appears entirely based on hope rather than expectation: that Biden can skate through with minimal scrutiny, maybe Trump will be convicted, Biden will finally get credit for the economy, or something. Something. Hoping kinda maybe that something disastrous won’t happen isn’t a strategy. It’s timid and reactive, at a time when Democrats and Independents need nothing more than basic reassurance the president is engaged, energetic, and the hardening narrative is overblown.
Will Biden make gaffes? Sure. Will we collectively cringe? Absolutely. But let’s see him next to his almost-as-old-and-totally-batshit-crazy opponent more often and, to Stewart’s point, see if he can assuage our concerns. It may be risky, but it’s better than crossing fingers.
A note about whatever this is …
After writing a few thousand articles for newspapers and magazines, I spent a long time trying a bunch of other stuff. I guess I figured what came (relatively) easily must by definition be less valuable, so I wandered in the corporate wilderness, becoming increasingly frustrated and doing work that felt increasingly lousy.
Sometimes with age comes wisdom, and I’ve realized finding something (relatively) easy ain’t a bad thing. So, this is a space where I’m resurrecting writing for myself, on topics weird and wild and wonderful.
Posts will appear when the mood takes me, but I do try to be consistently inconsistent—sometimes it’ll be a couple of days between drinks; sometimes a week. But if you subscribe, you’ll get a email letting you know I’m ranting. Again.