It is finally confirmed: Joe Biden's age does make him unsuitable to be president.
It is easy to pronounce a winner of last week’s US presidential debate. Plenty of people have, and you do not need to watch more than a couple of minutes to see just how much more alive Trump seems. Everyone has said it already, but it was astounding to see just how old and frail Biden appeared. There were always clips of him falling and looking confused, but until the debate he often at least spoke confidently and enunciated clearly, even if he stumbled over his words. In the debate Biden sounds like an old man, and I don’t think it is an overstatement to say that this debate might have cost him the election. As mentioned in my predictions, I thought he would lose before too, but the extreme polarisation and bad crop of presidential candidates for this coming election and the two before it means that for the average voter an election is an exercise in picking the lesser evil. American elections as of late are in that way defined by relative advantages as opposed to absolute advantages like being generally liked or having a strong and sensible policy agenda.
The debate then is crucial in Trump’s pitch in terms of relative advantage: the other guy is too old to be an effective leader. Does the rest matter? That’s both a genuine question for the American electorate and a damning critique of the American political system. It is somewhat of a trope to ask how a country like America ended up with these two candidates again; are there really no better politicians for leading the country? The answer is of course yes there are better candidates, but weak party institutions and the primary system have created the problems of Biden and Trump’s candidacies respectively.
A stronger party which had more of an independent view from its candidates would have been able to stop Biden from running again. It is obvious that the man is too old, and I think the list of people who could lose to Trump given his recent conviction is very short. Biden won in 2020 because he was someone different and had less baggage than Trump, and now the situation is reversed. The Democratic party must have seen that this would be a problem, but since the party doesn’t have the backbone to tell him that he has a low chance of winning he was allowed to primary where most of the serious potential rivals didn’t dare to oppose the sitting president. In short, there are plenty of people in the Democratic party who had the means, opportunity, and motive to field a different candidate but decided against it.
Similarly in the Republican party Trump was allowed to primary. Naturally, there are good reasons to want someone else as their candidate, but as I often say, Trump has a genuine grassroots following of people who want him specifically to win, and that is more than most American politicians can boast. Still, Trump’s three presidential campaigns are object lessons in why the primary system is a bad institution. In a country as polarized as the US it becomes necessary for primary candidates to play towards the radical wings of the party to win the primary which often means giving the wider electorate a candidate who is out of step with what ordinary people think.
As the debate showed both Trump and Biden are bad candidates who are unfit to rule the US. But in my view Biden is relatively more unfit owing to his age and that question, who is relatively more unfit, will be what decides the election. Through weak institutions and bad design America has created a political system which routinely picks two bad candidates and asks the voters who is relatively worse, rather than a political system that judges candidates on absolute advantages like better leadership, better policy agendas, or a more appealing ideology. I started by saying that it is easy to pick a winner of the debate, but in the spirit of American politics I’m more interested in picking a loser: the American people.
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I've always been interested in politics, economics, and the interplay between. The blog is a place for me to explore different ideas and concepts relating to economics or politics, be that national or international. The goal for the blog is to make you think; to provide new perspectives.
Written by Karl Johansson
Cover photo by RDNE Stock project from Pexels, edited by Karl Johansson