I know I’m in the minority when I say that the “Biden is too old” mantra is getting really old.
The president starts each morning on the Peleton, he lifts weights, he has the best health care in the western world – and overall he’s a lot more spry than his likeliest ’24 foe, a slab of bloat who needs a golf cart to wheel him from tee to tee. Trump is only three years younger than Biden, but imagine what it would look like if the criminal defendant tried to affix his capacious caboose to a bicycle seat, much less endeavored to ride at all.
Because how things “look” is apparently all that matters, right? Nobody gives a damn about policy substance, right? We’re obsessed with optics and visuals, as evidenced by the latest “Biden is old” pile-on. Charlie Sykes, an ex-talk show host, and Mike Murphy, an ex-GOP strategist (both never-Trumpers), riffed this week about Joe in an online chitchat. I’ll quote the key stuff.
Murphy: “The age problem, if you’re president, is like all of a sudden, you wake up one day and you’ve got antlers. And you go down to announce the great news that we found a cure for cancer, and all anybody wants to say is ‘What are those antlers?'”
Sykes: “The Joe Biden age problem, I think cognitively he can still do the job – there’s no indication he can’t…But every time he talks and walks, the way he moves around, it is sometimes, as you point out, the antler problem. He’ll walk in and he’ll have this litany of great accomplishments, and I’m thinking ‘Oh my God, the guy looks like he’s 150 years old right now’.”
Can I attempt to retort? I’ll be brief because you’re jonesing for the holiday weekend and I know you’d prefer that I not tarry:
Biden is creating jobs at an awesome pace, recently posting the lowest jobless rate since the summer man first walked on the moon, he’s boosting manufacturing, overseeing a drop in the inflation rate from 9 percent last year to 3.2 percent now, he’s spending record-high bucks to fight climate change, competing with China by spurring the domestic production of computer chips, driving down the cost of diabetics’ insulin, repairing roads and bridges like no previous president has ever done, negotiating lower prescription drug prices for Medicare recipients (which no predecessor ever did), strengthening NATO, buttressing Ukraine and foiling Putin, helping 4 million military vets who were exposed to burn pits, helming the massive federal recovery efforts in Maui and Florida, standing up for decency and democracy…but, gee whiz, he looks so OLD while doing it all!
If you catch my drift.
Have a great holiday weekend.