Biden’s Second-Term Mistake Age is only one of the reasons the President shouldn’t run again.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-second-term-mistake-23dd7cbe?mod=opinion_lead_pos11
The White House is whispering that next week President Biden will announce his intention to run for a second term, though the polls say that even most Democrats hope he doesn’t. The public understands what Mr. Biden apparently won’t admit: that electing an octogenarian in obvious decline for another four years could be an historic mistake.
No doubt it’s hard to walk away from the Oval Office after working for five decades to get there. Flying Marine One home for the weekends beats Amtrak. The chance to pull the levers of power is intoxicating, and that’s also true for the advisers who have pushed him in such a sharply progressive direction in his first term. They know Mr. Biden will lead wherever they want him to go.
But asking the country to elect a man who is 80 years old and whose second term would end when he is 86 is a risky act that borders on selfish. It’s impossible to know Mr. Biden’s real physical and mental state because the White House goes to great lengths to hide it. But his decline is clear to anyone who isn’t willfully blind. He rarely holds a press conference, and his words are as scripted as possible to avoid embarrassing stumbles that he nonetheless continues to make.
Different people age at different rates, but the risk of an accelerated decline for Mr. Biden is considerable. The chance that he could serve a full second term is hardly assured.
This means Americans could be voting for his running mate to take over in a second term, which as of now would be Vice President Kamala Harris. Mr. Biden would be running on a vow to serve a complete term that he knows he might not be able to keep. At the very least, he owes the country more than a Rose Garden repeat of his Wilmington basement campaign strategy from 2020.
For Democrats, there’s no small risk that Mr. Biden could decline noticeably in the 19 months until Election Day in 2024. In that event, voters on the fence could swing toward a Republican nominee who can at least meet the rigors of the office. Yes, even Donald Trump.
Mr. Biden may believe he’s the only Democrat who could beat Mr. Trump, but many others also could. And what if Republicans nominate someone else? GOP voters could decide they don’t want to repeat 2020, and a younger GOP nominee would have an advantage over Mr. Biden as the more vigorous candidate of generational change. A younger Democrat would have a comparable edge over Mr. Trump.
Many Democrats think Mr. Biden is the only man for the job because otherwise they would be stuck with Ms. Harris, a demonstrably bad candidate who has shown little capacity as Veep. But if Mr. Biden bowed out now, Democratic Governors and others would have ample time to organize a campaign and compete for the nomination. The way to get stuck with Ms. Harris is if Mr. Biden clears the field but then has a health setback that forces him to withdraw after the primaries are mostly done.
There are also political risks for Mr. Biden—not least the investigations into son Hunter and the Biden family’s business. Only the Bidens know where this might lead, but the Republicans aren’t going to stop pursuing the story. The way to end all that is not to run.
But the best reason not to run is for the patriotic good of the country. The world is growing more dangerous by the week, and the U.S. faces more formidable adversaries than any time since the height of the Cold War. It will take more than a figurehead President to confront and counter them. In 2008 Hillary Clinton ran an ad saying that she was prepared to take a 3 a.m. phone call in a crisis. Could an 84-year-old Joe Biden take a 3 p.m. call?
Enemies size up leaders as much as they do nations when they make their calculations to seize territory or seek other strategic advantage. There is a strong case to believe that Vladimir Putin decided to invade Ukraine in part because he judged that Mr. Biden lacked the determination to resist after his retreat from Afghanistan. Xi Jinping will not shrink from exploiting Mr. Biden out of Chinese respect for his elders.
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Mr. Biden can say he saved the country from a second Trump term. We would not call Mr. Biden’s Presidency a success, but no doubt many Democrats would. By their lights he can point to his Covid and climate spending and his resistance to Russian aggression in Ukraine. Second terms are rarely successful, and Mr. Biden could give a Democratic successor a chance to serve for eight years.
If Mr. Biden ignores all this and does run again, then some prominent Democrat would do the country a service by running against him in the primaries. The polls show that Democratic voters want another candidate. At this moment of great economic and strategic challenge, the United States needs a better presidential choice in 2024 than a redo of Joe Biden vs. Donald Trump.
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