Recently, I was talking with two of my writers about an older person in the workforce. When asked how old this person was, I said, “88,” and the two, a married couple, let out shrieks of horror.
“Isn’t there a rocking chair and a porch somewhere?” the husband asked. Just so. These are not the best of times for older people in the workplace, particularly when that workplace is American politics. Many Americans polled are worried about an 81-year-old President Joe Biden squaring off yet again against a 77-year-old former President Donald F. Trump.
Being an old soul, raised among adults — whom I now pray for and to in church as “the ancestors” — I’ve never been one to push people off the world stage — especially as I am in the Novak Djookovic phase of my journalism career.
He will be 37 in May, which John McEnroe once observed is like being “a 65-year-old office worker.” (Thanks a lot, Mac, and by the way, Happy 65th Birthday on Friday, Feb. 16th.)
“You and Djokovic are going to go out in a blaze of glory,” a sporting cousin said to me, only half-joking. He was trying to be kind and complimentary, but there is another way to look at this: The sun often blazes best when it’s setting.
Of course, office workers have a longer shelf life than athletes, dancers, construction crews and anyone else whose job is physically demanding. And there’s no office worker quite as inured in his or her position like a politician. Power will do that to you. But does it necessarily follow that just because these people have been in power forever and we want to see new faces that these politicians can’t do the job? After all, people like 80-year-old Mick Jagger are still going strong. Of course, Mick isn’t being asked to carry the nuclear football.
In Biden’s case, which has been judged more stringently than Trump’s, he looks and acts old — moving stiffly, the shock of white hair a distinguishing feature. Special counsel Robert Hur, investigating Biden’s possession of classified documents, concluded that there was no deliberate attempt to defraud the government and anyway he would be too feeble to stand trial. I blame Biden for this, not because he was careless with documents or threw his assistants under the bus or couldn’t remember the death date of beloved son Beau, but because he appointed waffling virtue signaler Merrick Garland as attorney general, and Garland in turn, because he always has to be noble and fair-minded, appointed a Trumpian special counsel who, having found no wrongdoing, had to undermine Biden’s vigor. (Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell treated President Barack Obama disgracefully by not entertaining Garland as a nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court. But having seen Garland in action as A.G., I’m glad he’s not on the highest bench. Memo to him and the Democrats: You don’t have to bend over backward to play fair, because the Republicans won’t.)
Much was made of Biden calling Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, president of Mexico when he’s president of Egypt. But I can understand that. Biden was angry, frustrated with the classified documents report and under pressure at a news conference. When most people are emotional and pressed, the subconscious kicks in. Biden has tied aid to the Middle East and Ukraine to what is happening at the southern border — again, there’s that desire to play fair — and the Republicans in the House of Representatives are using this against him by rejecting any bipartisan plan to fix the border trouble and pass aid to the Middle East and Ukraine. Both the Egyptian and the Mexican borders are haunted by migrants/refugees. Biden was talking Egypt but he was thinking Mexico.
Similarly, Trump conflated Republican rival Nikki Haley with former House Speaker and nemesis Nancy Pelosi in his flustered comments on the Jan. 6 insurrection, because both women get under his skin and he can’t stand that or them. And for all his bluster, he’s got to be terrified of being convicted of any of the 91 counts against him.
These mistakes are not the measure of these men. In Biden’s case, his years of public service enable him to engage in nuanced thinking on domestic and foreign policy. He may move awkwardly, forget a birthday and be prone to gaffes, but he knows how to thread the intellectual needle.
Trump is undereducated and intellectually lazy with no government experience despite being president for four years. But he’s got the dyed bouffant, orange mancake, hulking presence and outrageous comments going for him. He looks and sounds like a spectacle. And spectacle is what eternally adolescent America, in the bread-and-circus phase of empire as it spirals downward, craves. (Witness the classless, oafish Super Bowl.)
Whatever you may think of Biden — and this really requires you to put down your phone and think here — he is capable of thinking and acting rationally at home and on the world stage.
As for Trump, anyone who says that Russian President Vladimir Putin can attack a NATO ally behind in its dues — just because you’re a greedy blowhard prone to saying whatever you think will gin up the base — is not thinking and acting rationally.
Indeed, the contrast reminds me of the adage: It’s better to have a mind that you could potentially lose than never to have had a mind at all.