Loser. Lech. Damn! Old.

Why Do We Do This?

           Jimmy Carter was a lousy politician but a great post-president. Happy birthday, Jimmy!

Bill Clinton’s lust was a sign of his fecklessness, but his political skills were impressive. He did deal with the deficit.

Barack Obama was inspirational and historic, but when it came to Mitch McConnell and Bashar al-Assad, he blinked. We so wish he hadn’t.

And Joe Biden, well, he’s got one hell of a record as president. But he’s old.

And that’s not all.

In 2000, Al Gore was boring and pedantic. Remember the “lockbox”? He did win a Nobel for his environmental work. George W. Bush prevailed by a few hundred Florida votes and gave us the mess in Iraq and the loss in Afghanistan.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton, the former first lady, U.S. senator from New York, and secretary of state, was irritating; there was Clinton fatigue as well. So, the nation elected Donald J. Trump, holder now of ninety-one felony indictments.

Why is it that Democrats turn on the people with enough ambition and drive to aspire to the White House and – in the case of Carter, Bill Clinton, Obama, and Biden – actually made it?

I’m a year younger than Biden, and yes, I’m one of those who think he could rest on his formidable laurels. But I’m guessing that the relentless adjectives about him are enough to turn a man as proud and durable as he is into a determined exemplar of “I’ll show the bastards.”

I continue to believe that the prospect of a Biden-Trump choice in November 2024 is inconceivable. Events will not suspend for the primaries, criminal and civil trials, and the vagaries and stress of presidential campaigning in what used to be called the “golden years.”

My approach to predictions, however, is not to listen to them. No one really knows what will happen between now and Election Day.

My preferred scenario would be for Trump, one way or another, to get sufficiently nailed – a handful of felony convictions, for example – to be no longer viable.

And then Biden, the only person to have defeated Trump, could declare that he recognized that voters think he’s too old, and while he doesn’t agree, he understands and will now decide what to do – on his own terms and not because the public scrum is demanding that he get out.

The Democrats have a formidable bench in that case, if everyone possible is not assailed for a perceived weakness – which, because they are human, they all have.

I have just read Franklin Foer’s The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future, an account of the work of Biden and his team, including Blinken, Austin, Milley, Sullivan, Yellen, Raimondo, Burns, and (yes) Vice President Harris and others. The book resonates for the Biden team’s seriousness of purpose and the fact that there is none of the ridiculous squabbling that makes good media copy but is essentially pointless.

And the GOP? Don’t get me started.

On the occasion of the publication of Foer’s book, I read on Politico that Biden books don’t sell – compared, say to the endless stream of Trump-era accounts, by insiders, outsiders, almost anyone who can get a book contract.

I am not a pollster or prognosticator based on any on-the-ground reporting. But I do know something about books.

Think about The Last Politician as the mirror image of Bob Woodward’s Trump oeuvre, with titles like Peril, Rage, and Fear.

In January 2021, the United States was in the thrall of the worst pandemic in a century, a resulting major economic crisis, and a quagmire in Afghanistan. Managing all these successfully was impossible, but Biden and his folks definitely did try, maybe even did their best. The economy has recovered. Covid is now endemic, along with many other illnesses, but vaccines work and are available.

The withdrawal from Afghanistan was a tragedy. The last president, Ashraf Ghani, fled so fast that staff returning from lunch in Kabul had no idea he was gone. About 120,000 Afghans were evacuated then and many more since. Bush, Obama, and Trump for two decades left the problem for Biden.

Now as to the relative success of Biden books versus Trump books. Knowing what is public about what the advances were for the Trump books – two million dollars for Mike Pence, for example, and hundreds of thousands each for reporters’ exclusive accounts that made bestseller lists for a few weeks – publishers will have lost a great deal on money on those books.

Books are a commodity intended to make money. My bet is that, overall, more was lost than made on Trump.

If the time comes to vote for Joe Biden, I will definitely do so. If the Democratic ticket for president or vice president turns out to be different from Biden-Harris, I’m going to vote for that without reservation. And if there are complaints that Gavin Newsom is too slick or Gretchen Whitmer has no foreign policy experience or Gina Raimondo is too short, I’m going to ignore them.

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Over the weekend we heard from two men whose careers have been in service to the country. Gen. Mark Milley at his retirement ceremony as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff gave a peroration on the Constitution and democracy that was as firm on principles as the General’s amazing jaw, even at rest. And Attorney General Merrick Garland’s “60 Minutes” interview exceeds inspiration.