On the menu today: It was easy to miss, but earlier this week, the New York Times editorial board came right up to the line of declaring that Biden shouldn’t run for another term. We’re all witnessing a version of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” where everyone knows Biden is not merely old for a president; he’s several years older than the previous threshold for “getting too old to run for president,” and his light schedule reflects the reality of what can be done with an 80-year-old commander in chief. But everyone around the president, and Democratic Party as a whole, must pretend they don’t see it and that all of this is normal. Meanwhile, some idiotic Pentagon officials think it’s a good idea to tell Politico how happy they are that Tucker Carlson isn’t on television anymore. And the city government of San Francisco learns a hard lesson and takes one small step closer to sanity.
Even the Warnings about Biden Being Old Are Getting Old
The New York Times editorial board was never going to come out and say, “Joe Biden shouldn’t run for another term because he’s too old to do the job anymore.” That would represent cutting off an incumbent Democratic president at the knees, a betrayal of a president who delivered a lot of policy wins, and perhaps even spur some serious Democrat — sorry, Marianne Williamson and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — to launch a primary bid. If the Times had declared Biden shouldn’t run again, in the coming year, we would have seen a million sentences saying, “Even the New York Times thinks Biden is too old to serve another term.”
But the Times’ house editorial on Monday came right up to the line of declaring that Biden taking the oath of office at age 82 in January 2025, and the notion of him serving in office until he is 86, is absurd. The Times warned, “Candidates shouldn’t pretend, as Mr. Biden often does, that advanced age isn’t an issue,” and that “If Mr. Biden runs again, as he recently said he intends to, questions will persist about his age until he does more to assure voters that he is up to the job.”
Inherent in that statement is a warning that Biden has not done enough to assure voters he is up to the job. That verb tense of “is” instead of “will be” is also intriguing. The editorial continued:
Concerns about age — both in terms of fitness for office and being out of touch with the moment — are legitimate, as Mr. Biden acknowledged in an interview in February with ABC News. His standard line, repeated in that interview, is: “The only thing I can say is, ‘Watch me.’”
But Mr. Biden has given voters very few chances to do just that — to watch him — and his refusal to engage with the public regularly raises questions about his age and health.
The usual White House method of demonstrating a president’s mastery is to take tough questions in front of cameras, but Mr. Biden has not taken advantage of that opportunity, as The Times reported on Friday. He has held fewer news conferences and media interviews than most of his modern predecessors. Since 1923, only Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan took fewer questions per month from reporters, and neither represents a model of presidential openness that Mr. Biden should want to emulate. His reticence has created an opening for critics and skeptics. . . .
His most recent health summary, released on Feb. 16, said much the same thing, describing him as a “healthy, vigorous 80-year-old male who is fit to successfully execute the duties of the presidency.” But his cognitive abilities went unmentioned. That’s something he should discuss publicly and also demonstrate to the voters, who expect the president to reflect the nation’s strength.
If he runs again, Mr. Biden will need to provide explicit reassurance to voters; many of them have seen family members decline rapidly in their 80s. Americans are watching what Mr. Biden says and does, just as he has asked them to do.
That’s about as skeptical and critical an assessment as we can expect from the Times.
Biden is 80 and will turn 81 in November. It’s not just that Biden is old; it’s that he’s now quite a few years older than the previous definition of “old for a presidential candidate.”
When Ronald Reagan ran for reelection in 1984 at age 73, former undersecretary of state George Ball wrote an op-ed for the New York Times, warning that Reagan would be like Woodrow Wilson — incapacitated for much of his second term.
In 1992, Bill Clinton’s campaign painted incumbent president George H. W. Bush as old, tired, and out of touch. Bush was 68 years old on Election Day that year.
When Bob Dole ran in 1996, he was 73. In 1995, when Dole was 72, the cover of Time magazine asked, “Is Dole too old for the job?” (Kids, you may not understand this, but the cover of Time magazine used to be a really huge deal. It was even bigger than being the top story on Apple News or Google News.)
When John McCain ran in 2008, he was 71. In October of that year, the Pew Research Center found that 58 percent of Obama voters believed McCain was too old to be president. There is a good chance that the overwhelming majority of those Obama voters will vote for Joe Biden in the coming cycle.
Oh, and Donald Trump is currently 76, and turns 77 in June.
Old age, which was considered a terrible liability with Republican presidents and candidates, is a strange non-issue to Democratic Party officials and their allies, at least when they’re on the record. The average Democrat, though, is not so reticent to express his doubts; 57 percent of Democrats told a CNBC survey that Biden shouldn’t run for another term.
Notice that yesterday’s announcement of Biden’s reelection bid was done entirely by a pre-recorded, three-minute video. Biden did give a speech yesterday, at the North America Building Trades Unions Legislative Conference, but he didn’t mention his intention to run for another term. He made the vague allusion, “Folks, we made a lot of progress because of all of you. But there’s more to do, so let’s finish the job.” As usual, he took no questions.
Biden hasn’t held a solo press conference in 2023; he has held two joint press conferences with foreign heads of state. Biden did just five solo press conferences in 2022.
The White House insists Biden makes up for the lack of press conferences by doing a lot of sit-down interviews, but as the Times notes, a lot of these are celebrity fluff interviews. “In the past few months, Mr. Biden has sat for separate, lengthy interviews with the actors Jason Bateman and Drew Barrymore, the weatherman Al Roker, and Manny MUA, a beauty blogger on YouTube. Ms. Barrymore’s opening question during her interview was about whether Mr. Biden was a good gift giver to his wife, prompting a long conversation about the poems that he writes for the first lady every year.”
The White House has to carefully manage Biden’s travel schedule, since overseas trips wear him out, as the Times has reported. After the recent Ireland trip, Biden had no public events for three and a half days.
Biden did almost no in-person campaigning or public events in 2020 once the Covid pandemic hit in March; the term “basement campaign” was not an exaggeration. Covid was a nonfactor in American life by last autumn, but Biden didn’t get out on the trail much in 2022, either. And now, the New York Times reports, “Biden has no immediate plans to barnstorm the key battlegrounds. Decorative bunting is nowhere to be found, and large rallies will come later.”
Now, ask yourself: If Biden could get out on the trail, and do more than one public event per day, wouldn’t he be doing that? Because Biden isn’t doing these things, isn’t that a de facto admission that he can barely handle his current duties? What will Biden’s physical and mental state be a year from now? Two years from now? Five years and change from now, when the Democratic Party envisions him wrapping up his second term?
The Democratic National Committee has no intention of holding primary debates.
Dear Defense Officials: You Are Not Political Pundits
It is an extremely bad idea for “Pentagon officials” to talk to Politico and lead the outlet to declare, “At the upper levels of the Defense Department, news of Carlson’s firing from Fox News on Monday was met with delight and outright glee in some corners.” The U.S. military is supposed to be an apolitical institution that protects and serves all Americans and does not take sides in political or ideological disputes.
I have no doubt that many Pentagon employees didn’t like what Tucker Carlson was saying. It is also likely that you can find a whole bunch of Pentagon employees who liked what Carlson was saying, and you can also find quite a few Pentagon employees who paid little or no attention to Carlson. The Pentagon is the workplace for about 27,000 enlisted and civilian employees.
Tucker Carlson has the same First Amendment rights as any other American. Now, if Russian state television and Putin’s regime ever told me I was doing a good job, I would likely go on a self-flagellation bender that would make that guy from The Da Vinci Code look like a laid-back hedonist. But being praised by Russian state television does not mean a person is an agent of the Russian state, nor does it represent a crime. In this country, you are free to say whatever you like, and it is not the job of the U.S. government — and certainly not the U.S. military! — to set limits on what opinions are acceptable and unacceptable. Pentagon officials doing anonymous touchdown dances about Carlson’s departure from the airwaves comes uncomfortably close to turning the Pentagon into an overtly political institution.
ADDENDUM: In a better world, lawmakers from left, right, and center would learn the lesson from San Francisco and never again waste time with ordinances requiring city or state employees to boycott other states. Back in 2016, the city board of supervisors enacted a law “prohibiting agencies from doing business with companies based in states with laws that discriminate against LGBTQ+ people, restrict access to abortion or make it difficult to vote.” That added up to 30 states. The city board recently repealed the law, concluding it hadn’t achieved any of its goals, and had merely made the city’s operations more expensive:
A recent report by City Administrator Carmen Chu’s office found that only one state had been removed from the list and none ever said they changed their laws because of San Francisco’s. Additionally, the report found that the law made city contracting a more cumbersome and expensive process.
An earlier report from the board’s Budget and Legislative Analyst found that implementing the boycott had cost the city nearly $475,000 in staffing expenses. And the city was approving a large number of exemptions to the boycott anyway: Departments granted 538 waivers for contracts worth $791 million between mid-2021 and mid-2022, the report found. The legislative analyst said the full effect of the boycott on the city’s contract costs was difficult to pin down but pointed to past research that had found that a fully competitive process could produce savings up to 20%.