Hage Geingob died in early February. This was neither a personal tragedy nor a political earthquake. He was 82 and had led a very full life. And the country he ruled, Namibia, has a population roughly half the size of Ireland’s.
What was significant about his death was that he was the only serving elected head of government older than Joe Biden. That guttering torch had passed to the American president.
The ageing process affects individuals in different ways. Back in February, I did a public event in Dublin with Bernie Sanders, who is 82 – a year older than Biden. He was, in public and private, razor sharp and mentally vigorous. The same is true of our own president Michael D. Higgins who, at 83, is also older than Biden.
But neither of these men is running a country. Moreover, neither is aspiring to be still running that global superpower when he is 86, as Biden would be were he to be re-elected. And Biden, even before his disastrous debate with Donald Trump last week, was very obviously not – or at least not always – razor sharp and mentally vigorous. He is patently too old for the immense task he faces.
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The big question is why it has taken such a terrifying meltdown for the American liberal establishment to say this out loud. Everyone with a stim of wit recognises that the election in November is one of the most important in US history. American democracy is on the line – the stakes for both the US and the rest of the world could scarcely be higher.
In this context, the failure of so much of the political and media nexus to acknowledge – until it is almost too late – that Biden should not be seeking a second term is more than a sin of omission. It is a dereliction of duty.
The baby boomers who once thrilled to Bob Dylan’s youthful scorn as he sang “Senators, congressmen/Please heed the call/Don’t stand in the doorway/Don’t block up the hall” have stood in the doorway watching an unfolding political tragedy and mentally blocked out what is staring them in the face.
Biden’s insistence on running again in 2024 is an old man’s folly. He had the chance to retire on a high, having saved the US from Trump, steered its economy through the end of the pandemic, expanded healthcare for millions of ordinary citizens and pushed through the first serious American response to the climate crisis. He could have gone out at the top, to be remembered as the figure who rescued his country at one of its worst moments and set it firmly on a better path.
There’s only one reason he didn’t do this: vanity. Biden developed a saviour complex. He convinced himself that he is the only one who can beat Trump. This conviction oddly mirrors Trump’s claim that the US is broken and “I alone can fix it”. Biden’s motives are infinitely more benign, but he nonetheless shares the “I alone” delusion.
It’s a delusion because it demands the denial of a very clear fact: Americans don’t want an elderly president. In opinion surveys, only three per cent of American adults say it is best for US presidents to be in their 70s or older. Nearly half of Democrats say the best age for presidents is in their 50s, while a quarter prefer presidents in their 40s. These are, indeed, the age ranges at the time of election of all Democratic presidents since 1961 – except Biden.
You can deplore this attitude as much as you like. You can dismiss it as ageism. But you can’t wish it away. In a democracy, the desires of the electorate have to be respected. In normal times, it would be stupid to defy them. In times of such profound crisis, it is culpably reckless.
Those who have indulged Biden’s vanity have taken refuge in a proposition that is both true and irrelevant: Trump is nearly as old as Biden and shows at least as many signs of cognitive confusion.
Trump has, indeed, seemed in some of his speeches to suggest that he defeated Barack Obama in 2016, that Obama is the current president and that Kim Jong-un is the ruler of China. Yet what everybody surely knows by now is that Trump is judged according to different standards. However mad he seems, it’s just Trump being Trump.
Biden’s senescence was placed on the political agenda in January, in the report of the special counsel Robert Hur into Biden’s retention of official documents at his homes. Hur, a Republican, took the opportunity to characterise Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory” and “diminished faculties”.
Democrats responded by claiming (with some justice) that this language was deliberately chosen for political effect. Biden held a press conference in which he insisted that “my memory is fine” – and then described the Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as “the president of Mexico, el-Sisi”.
That press conference was every bit as disastrous as Biden’s performance in last week’s debate. There could not have been a louder wake-up call: Biden’s “diminished faculties” were going to be a huge factor in the election and Biden could not be relied on to give public performances that would banish these concerns. Yet the Democrats pressed the snooze button and most of their media allies continued to pretend that everything was fine.
It’s not fine – the United States is in imminent danger of being handed back to a Trump who is vastly more malign than he was in 2016: more deranged, more vengeful, more openly willing to use Nazi rhetoric, more contemptuous of all constitutional restraints, more assured than ever that there is nothing at all he cannot get away with.
And the Democrats are afraid of what? Hurting Joe Biden’s feelings? Being accused of ageism? Acting impolitely? If so they are distracting themselves with minor anxieties in order not to face the real terror that is looming in front of them – and us.