Ah but I was so much older then

 

Dr. Jill Biden celebrating her 70th birthday at Rehoboth Beach. Smiler on the right evidently not ex-president Donald J. Trump, who probably hasn’t climbed on a bike since his political views were fixed around 1977. Photo by Jim Watson/AFP via Getty, from Peop

To some commentators, President Joe Biden is an ostensibly nice old guy you couldn’t easily get a jury to convict of the crime of holding on to documents he wasn’t supposed to have, partly because there isn’t any evidence he was doing it on purpose, but also because even if he was guilty he’d probably be able to convince them he was just forgetful.

To others, he’s the most radical leftist president since at least Harry S. Truman, who refuses to let up on his determination to boost labor union membership, tax the wealthy, lift children out of poverty, protect minority voting rights, declare jubilees on student debt and medical debt, rework the immigration system so those empty counties in the Great Plains can pick up some of the population they so desperately need from among the homeless and tempest-tossed, put an end to the use of carbon fuels, and establish a Palestinian state in the Middle East.

Don’t @ me on any of those examples unless you want a sandbag heaved at your head. I am aware that Biden has not accomplished all his presidential aims.

The first set of more-or-less facts (no doubt pretty frustrating to Republican prosecutors) is now being served up as evidence for a different and unrelated case, medical rather than legal according to which he’s suffering from advanced dementia, and it’s time to send him to a farm upstate and turn the executive responsibilities over to somebody more popular among the nonpartisan or unlabeled.

I went through some of the second set of facts back in early September, toward the conclusion that if that’s what octogenarian presidents do, maybe we need more octogenarian presidents, if only because of the three big bills, as I wrote then:

• the American Rescue Plan, which not only spent billions on bringing COVID under control with vaccine distribution and school reopening (people somehow can’t remember that it was under the Trump administration that all the school closings took place) but devoted much of its $2 trillion to those $1400 stimulus checks and the (unfortunately temporary) expansion of the Child Tax Credit that cut child poverty in our country by 50%;
• the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act bringing $550 billion in new spending on everything from the nation’s waterways and transit systems to its airports and electric grid, electric vehicle charging stations, and zero- and low-emissions buses and ferries (far from the original proposal of $3.4 trillion, but try finding something to compare it to that actually did happen over the last generation or two); the first serious gun control legislation in decades (toughening requirements for the youngest gun buyers, keeping firearms out of the hands of more domestic abusers and helping states implement “red flag” laws, along with funding for mental health and violence intervention programs and school safety initiatives);
• the Chips & Science Act spending $280 billion to fund expanding the nation’s semiconductor industry to help keep pace with Chinese competition and scientific research in areas like artificial intelligence, biotechnology and quantum computing, with “regional innovation and technology hubs” bringing jobs and economic growth to the most distressed parts of the country (that’s the bit that so amazed David Brooks, who’s always moaning about the Rust Belt but never thought of anything that could be done about it);
• and the “Inflation Reduction Act” making our largest ever investment in combating climate change—putting the US on track to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 40% below 2005 levels by the end of the decade, together with investments in environmental justice, conservation and resiliency programs, plus allowing the government to negotiate prescription drug prices for seniors on Medicare, something we’ve been screaming for forever, extending federal health insurance subsidies, and capping out-of-pocket costs for insulin at no more than $35 per month for Medicare beneficiaries, which is even contributing to the reduction of inflation! and
• TAXING THE RICH with new taxes on big corporations, setting a minimum corporate tax of 15%, and new funding for the Internal Revenue Service in an effort to crack down on tax evasion, reducing the federal budget deficit by about $300 billion over 10 years.

That last number is now estimated at $561 billion—$851 billion if the IRS funding is renewed, which Republicans in Congress will stop if they can. And it’s only a down payment on what could be achieved in inequality reduction with a cooperative legislature (which I realize we’re not too likely to get out of the 2024 elections—on the other hand we should also be thinking about what we’ve got to defend out of the current term, and what we have to lose if the Democratic candidate loses, and the threats of the Republican candidate who claims he only aims to be dictator for a day).

When I was worried about Biden’s age, back in early 2020, it was more about his brain habits than the physiology; the habits of a lifetime as senator from the banking industry that is such a dominant part of Delaware’s economy, the eager befriender of unreconstructed Southern Democrats trying to knit the party back together after the McGovern debacle in the 1970s, the opponent of busing, the crusader for incarceration and against “welfare as we know it” in the 1990s, the Cold Warrior who didn’t necessarily understand what had happened to the Cold War, and so on. I was also among those who really liked Biden as vice president, for the thing he brought to Obama’s campaigns and governing style, as epitomized in the apparent “gaffe” (carefully calculated, IMO) where he pushed the administration to move in favor of same-sex marriage, but I wasn’t sorry he decided not to run in 2016. (In terms of “progressive” cred, I thought Hillary Clinton had more; Biden had more in common with triangulating Bill than she did.)

But watching Biden work his way through the 2020 campaign convinced me that he was well adapted to the present: his deep attention to the Black vote (as we moved into the George Floyd summer), and the policy collaboration he gradually moved into with Sanders and Warren (and, I can’t ever say this enough, Warren’s pro-equality economists, Saez and Zucman, who were key designers of the Build Back Better program). I really began to think of him as the candidate who was young enough, next to stodgy young Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and Yang. And others have noticed—like Thomas Zimmer—the people crying about Biden’s age are pretty old, or at least pretty tired, themselves:

in recent days, spurred by the Hur report, it has come in a particularly forceful, aggressive fashion from a political spectrum that I would describe as the center to as far right as you can go within the – ostensibly – anti-MAGA camp: From establishment conservatives, the center-right and people who self-identify as liberals, but with a distinctly anti-left/anti-“woke” bend, which plausibly puts them, labels aside, at the center of the political discourse. Specifically, I want to dissect the “Biden too old” arguments that have come out in the New York Times – from the already mentioned stable of opinionists (Douthat, Stephens, Dowd) and the paper’s editorial board, plus a reaction from Damon Linker, who is prominently holding down that liberal centrism space, titled “What the Hell is Wrong with the Democrats?

You know right? There are points where some of us might want to criticize Biden, as with his willingness to sacrifice asylum seekers by making the initial “credible fear interview” somewhat harder to pass, and he’s definitely taking too long to tell Binyamin Netanyahu to go fuck himself while tens of thousands (including dozens of hostages captured from Israel) die under Israeli bombs as part of his plan to force Netanyahu into allowing the establishment of a Palestinian state. That’s not what’s driving this.

Something tells me the crying about Biden’s age is coming from people who think he’s too effective on these economic issues, is all I’m saying.

Cross-posted from the Substack.