Debate displays the perils of gerontocracy

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This article was published 29/06/2024 (491 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Two presidential candidates walked onto the debate stage, that grand political arena, Thursday night and spent the evening putting on one of the most depressing displays in recent political history.

Democratic President Joe Biden, 81, seeking a second straight term, and former U.S. president Donald Trump, seeking a second non-consecutive term, were supposed to be at their best, relative to each of them. They weren’t.

Much of the morning-after discussion has fixated on Biden — obviously struggling to find words, slurring, losing the thread of his own talking point only to end on non sequiturs. He made Trump, 78, look much more than a few years younger by comparison. But while Trump had the advantage of speaking more clearly and articulately, and otherwise coming off as forceful and (comparatively) coherent, nothing he said was of much substance. It was the usual Trump hyberbole — everything he did in office was the best anyone has ever seen; everything Joe Biden has done is the worst it has ever been done.

Biden was a walkman quickly running out of battery, the sound slowing and drawling and coming to a stop with a sudden “click,” and his opponent was a turntable, speakers cranked to the max, needle endlessly skipping on the record.

Moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash asked the questions one might expect of the occasion, questions surrounding immigration, and hot-button foreign policy issues on the topics of the Russia-Ukraine War and the Israel-Hamas war. None of those questions was done justice by Biden’s mumbling or Trump’s bloviating. The two seemed buoyed only by mutual antipathy — Biden spoke most clearly when insulting Trump, stating his opponent has “the morals of an alley cat.”

Both were asked point-blank about their own fitness to lead, given their advanced age. That question, after each asserted they were fit for the role, devolved into an argument over who was the better golfer.

Presidential debates are often framed in terms of who won, and who lost. There’s little need to do that here: everybody lost on Thursday.

This is a disaster of the American political class’s own making, the embarrassing example of gerontocracy in action.

It’s easy to say this was more of a disaster for Biden. Trump did what most people might have expected him to do, whereas Biden much more obviously failed to rise to the occasion. But both the Democrat and Republican parties are mired in an unwillingness to take aging, failing leaders out of the game when the time is right.

We’ve seen it before. It was just last year that Republican veteran and current Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, now 82, was caught on video freezing mid-sentence during a news conference, staring blankly ahead until someone came to lead him away so he might gather himself. Late Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein announced her retirement last year as evidence of her failing faculties mounted.

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Incumbents generally have the advantage in an election, making them hard to dislodge. That suits a party apparatus fine most of the time, as it leaves them confident in holding on to certain offices. But there is a time where holding on to a seat cannot be worth the degradation in ability to govern that can result when a longtime politician hangs on too long.

Now, the two presidential candidates are showing us just that. To be clear, age and vitality can be very different things — certainly many of us know octo- or even nonagenarians who are alert, spry, quick on the draw. But these two men are not, and that should be unacceptable when it comes to leading a global superpower.

Trump’s position on the debate stage is easier to understand. Trump won a primary contest in which he faced genuine opposition, raised to victory on a tide of MAGA-world voters loyal to him. The Republicans are, frankly, stuck with him.

But Biden faced few primary challengers, most of whom withdrew before or during the primaries themselves. The Democratic party, as an institution, has refused to demand the aging Biden step aside and did not attempt to unseat him through the primary process.

That is a mistake they should well be regretting now. Thursday’s debacle made it clear what happens when both parties in a two-party system stick to their old, tired horses, for better — or worse.