I ask once more: America turned 247 yesterday, but will it live to 250? And, if it does, will it do so despite the soft bigotry of ageism? What else are we to make of the nonsensical argument that Joe Biden is “too old” despite the transformative nature of his Presidency?
Trump exposed, among other things, the persistence of bigotry in America. Misogyny, racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim and antigay sentiments released from the Pandora’s box with his election. But ageism, too, is a bigotry, however soft. Late in his 70s, Trump coined the moniker “sleepy Joe” against his opponent, Joe Biden. And although Biden won, the sobriquet has stuck.
It took, for example, three sentences in for media writer Jack Shafer to mention Biden’s age in his controversial, silly post “Why Democrats Should Primary Biden.” Some of the descriptors employed by Shafer against the President are quite cringeworthy. “Needs a tuneup”; “stiff”; “dolt”; “doddering” and “out of condition” are tossed out by merely the second paragraph.
Is Biden, at 80, too old to be President? According to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, one half of Democrats think so. But by way of answering that question, it should be noted that Harrison Ford, also 80, led the American box office reprising his role as our favorite archaeologist-adventurer over the weekend. And while Indiana Jones is a fictional character, it says something about the importance of perception in dealing with the issue of age. Biden acknowledges that his age is a legitimate concern to voters and has taken it on as one of the primary tasks of his campaign. To convince voters that he is, indeed, up to the job.
Biden has proven himself more than up to the task. Let’s turn our attention for a moment to his surefooted handling of Putin, one of America’s most dangerous geopolitical competitors. If any world leader provides a test to a President’s sharpness, it is Vladimir Putin, who has vexed four of his predecessors. Biden’s slow and steady navigation of the Ukraine War is the result of decades in foreign policy. Some might call that senectitude; I’d call it Understanding, the elder cousin of Knowing.
There was no trace of “Sleepy Joe” when the President strategically allowed Russia’s autocratic leader to commit a series of unforced errors that has left him on the brink of civil war. There was no trace of “Sleepy Joe” when Biden presided over the collapse of the Wagner Group in the Ukraine theater. There was no trace of “Sleepy Joe” when the President negotiated, for pennies on the dollar, this Russian pandaemonium. “And I would just like to point out, we have spent roughly 5% of our military, of what we budget for our military, that's what’s gone to Ukraine,” Congressman Don Bacon, Republican of the Armed Services Committee, reminded us on Meet the Press earlier this summer. “And it's depleted roughly half of Russia's army.”
Bacon, a Republican, continued:
That's what we've done in the last year and a half. And I think this has weakened Russia for, well, maybe a decade to come, which is good for the Baltic countries. It's good for Poland. And it would be different if Putin was wanting to be a peaceful neighbor, but he's not. So we see the barbaric – basically, what he's doing is, "might makes right," and that's not what we want with a major nuclear country. And so I think we have a moral obligation to stand up here and help Ukraine. I think too many Republicans have tried to stay under the radar on this.
This, dear reader, does not sound like the actions of a “woozy” American President.
And how about “Bidenomics”? Biden’s bold transition to industrial policy, up from neoliberalism, is another quantum shift in thinking. It can only be properly construed under the category of radical. It will take generations to fully measure the impact of this change. Further, prices at the grocery store and the gas pump are returning to a sense of normalcy, as everybody knows. “Leading economists at big banks like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase have lowered their odds of an imminent recession, pointing to a resilient labor market and steady household finances as signs that the U.S. can weather the storm as the Federal Reserve continues to drive up borrowing costs,” writes Sam Sutton in Politico.
And what about the President’s strong commitment to the environment? It is a commitment, in part, born from his Catholicism. The Inflation Reduction Act included $370 billion in subsidies for clean energy projects, resulting in the early and unanimous endorsement of the four largest environmental groups. And we haven’t even touched upon Biden’s ambitious clean hydrogen energy plan, equal parts jobs, labor and pro-environmental policy. While we are on the subject of labor, it should be noted that the AFL-CIO endorsed Biden at the earliest juncture in the election cycle than they have ever done before …
Finally, have we forgotten about the President’s aggressive American Rescue Plan? No, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we most assuredly have not. ARPA, as promised, has probably helped keep unemployment at its present historic lows. Also — the child tax credit. Before it lapsed, supplemental poverty numbers from the Census Bureau showed that African-American child poverty fell from 17.2% in 2020 to 8.3% in 2021. In all, the bureau noted, 716,000 African-American children were lifted out of poverty. What’s more, ARPA is helping American labor and American infrastructure as other parts of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) are just now kicking in to high gear. ARPA is helping rejuvenate the urban development of cities through the $350 billion Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds (SLFRF) program. Cities, it should be noted, that are not particularly Democrat strongholds: like Fort Worth, Akron, parts of Maine as well as rural Pennsylvania. Infrastructure week, after a long and seemingly interminable wait under the other guy, is finally here.
In describing the President I consciously here chose to employ descriptors like “bold,” “aggressive,” “ambitious” and “strong.” None of these are commensurable with the sleeping sickness. Biden should be judged upon his execution of his project to be a transformational President. And that execution, by this writers reckoning, has been naught else but damn fantastic.
“Maternal deaths across the U.S. more than doubled over the course of two decades, and the tragedy unfolded unequally. Black mothers died at the nation’s highest rates, while the largest increases in deaths were found in American Indian and Native Alaskan mothers.” (Laura Ungar/AP)
“In a revealing footnote, Chief Justice John Roberts concedes that affirmative action has made our military stronger and more diverse.” (Peter Dreier/The Nation)
“The clean energy subsidies that undergird President Joe Biden’s climate agenda have just prompted one Norwegian manufacturer to choose Michigan, not Europe, as the site of a nearly $500 million factory that will produce the equipment needed to extract hydrogen from water.” (Gabriel Gavin and Ben LeFebvre/Politico)
"The US economy has added more than 13 million jobs since he took office in January 2021, including nearly 800,000 manufacturing jobs. Inflation, after soaring for most of last year, has declined for 11 consecutive months. Biden’s speech contained little new policy substance. The significance was in its packaging, its push to get the president more public credit for the country’s current economic progress by branding it all as ‘Bidenomics.’" (Chris Smith/VF)
“The essential criticism here—that reporters too often treat the Supreme Court as hallowed institutional ground and its decisions as pure expressions of judicial science, rather than as a political body engaged in politics—is not new.” (Jon Allsop/CJR)