RUTHFULLY YOURS

EXCERPT:

Kamala Harris’s Chances

Late last week, after President Biden’s disastrous prime-time press conference, our Phil Klein delivered an assessment that sounded insane . . . and yet, in light of recent events, deserves serious consideration: “Democrats would be better off facing Donald Trump with [Kamala] Harris as their presidential nominee than taking their chances with a rapidly declining [Joe] Biden.”

I can hear readers now: Harris is a joke, a liability, a walking disaster who is so self-evidently a weak candidate and leader that not a single prominent Democrat has called upon Biden to announce he’s serving just one term.

But as these past few days have made abundantly clear, Biden’s age is the single biggest problem jeopardizing the Democrats’ chances of keeping the White House. Never mind that a super-majority of Americans thinks Biden is too old to serve another term; a super-majority of Democrats thinks Biden is too old to serve another term, according to the latest polling from ABC News:

According to the poll, conducted using Ipsos’ Knowledge Panel, 86 percent of Americans think Biden, 81, is too old to serve another term as president. That figure includes 59 percent of Americans who think both he and former President Donald Trump, the Republican front-runner, are too old and 27 percent who think only Biden is too old. . . .

73 percent of Democrats think Biden is too old to serve.

This is a problem that cannot be fixed. Biden cannot get younger. There’s something a little sad about Democrats who think that the problem can be solved if the White House and Biden campaign staff just put the president in front of the cameras more:

Top party operatives are warning Biden aides that the president cannot retreat in response to the special counsel report that fueled concerns over his age and mental faculties. They say President Joe Biden, having largely shied away from interviews and press conferences, needs to be out in public far more.

They want to see him engage with the press and voters in the off-script and punchy exchanges he’s been known for in the past, which they believe will help chip away at concerns about the president’s mental acuity. They say that it’s worth the risk of potential slip-ups that could reinforce the image that he’s declining.

Why do you think Biden’s public events are so few and far between, compared to a normal president’s? It’s because he can’t do them. If you put Biden out in public more, Americans are going to keep seeing what they’ve been seeing. There is no sharper, quicker-witted, and more energetic Joe Biden hiding behind the curtain, waiting for the right moment to emerge. What you see is what you get.

Yes, Harris comes with her own problems — plenty of problems — but she would instantly nullify the age issue.

Democrats are used to their nominee being the younger one, the fresher face, the representative of change and progress — Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama. When Democrats have failed to win the presidency in the past generation, they’ve usually had an older nominee. In 2004, John Kerry was 61. In 2016, Hillary Clinton was 69. Democrats are used to painting Republicans as the old fogeys who are out of touch. One of the reasons that the Biden era has been so frustrating to Democrats is that this time, their guy is an old fogey who is out of touch.