Is Biden Too Old to Run Again? Some Democrats Think So

On a recent Real Time with Bill Maher, Maher and his panel — leftist writer Caitlin Flanagan from The Atlantic and insipid CNN commentator Van Jones — discussed the Biden presidential track record. Maher argued that some Democrats are saying Biden’s advanced age and declining “acuity” put him in a vulnerable place for re-election in 2024. Biden turns 80 years old this month.

“I find there’s a paradox with Biden,” said Maher. “Like when I talk to people in the last few months, it’s like the first thing is he should not run again. I’m talking about Democrats who are, you know, pretty much in the camp. He should not — but do you think he’s doing a good job? He’s doing great. He’s doing great — we don’t want any more of that,” quipped Maher. The contradiction Maher points out happens because Democrats know Biden is mentally unfit for the job, but they also know he’s been ramming the Democratic Agenda down the throats of Americans, which is way more important to them than any individual old man’s health.

“I think one of the reasons [Biden’s] so appealing is that he hearkens back to when the Democratic Party was really the party of the working man and woman,” said Flanagan. “Didn’t matter your race; didn’t matter where you were in the country; strong union(s)…I mean, he’s doing a great job of things that really matter to us.” Well, there you go. Putting aside the fact that the Dems were never really on the side of America’s working men and women, The Agenda is everything. And besides, there’s nothing wrong with being “super old” or something.

“The reason [Biden] remembers those techniques is he’s super old,” Flanagan explained. “There’s nothing wrong with being old. There’s no shame to it…but there are natural processes that happen and it seems like he is certainly losing his acuity, which a lot of older men do, and compensating it with this wonderful ability to get people to work together…We’ve all known old people, and we’re like, yeah, we’ll take the keys now,” she said. Yeah, that Biden is some uniter, like when he’s calling Republicans extremists and treating them like domestic terrorists or when he uses the FBI to raid American homes.

“I think the reality is, when Biden is strong, he’s very strong,” Jones said. “And when he’s weak, he’s very weak and that’s what people are responding to. From my point of view, you have a couple of challenges here: if the public in 2024 sees what they perceive to be a weak insider, versus a scary outsider — a Trump or DeSantis — if that’s the perception you’ve seen in France, what you’ve seen in Italy, what you’ve seen in Sweden — is the public breaks toward that scary outsider. And so, I do think people have a reason to be concerned if he continues to be perceived as weak. But the reality is, what’s the alternative to Biden?” asked Jones. Ruh Roh, maybe VP Kamala?

Jones went on to ~~blather about~~ list all the “impossible things Biden has gotten done” in his two years in office. Guns, climate, and infrastructure were all “done” in the imaginary Democratic world where “nothing happened under Trump” because “at a certain point, you got to give the guy his credit.” Give Biden credit? How about we give him credit for record-high inflation, record-high gasoline and consumer prices, stagnant wages, and rising debt?

If Biden doesn’t run in 2024, what do the Dems think about running Kamala Harris instead? “I’ll give you another reason why, a good reason why Biden shouldn’t run: the Kamala problem,” Maher said later in the episode. “Now, I like Kamala Harris, but for whatever reason, it just didn’t work out, okay? I think she would make a great president of the University of Santa Barbara here in California. But if Joe doesn’t run, then we don’t have to worry about her running, because it’s hard to get rid of your running mate that you ran with last time. But if you don’t run, then that kind of goes out with you.”

“Let me put it another way,” Maher added. “Couldn’t Biden wind up doing a kind of Ruth Bader Ginsburg thing where he stays on a little too long and takes down the whole thing with him?”

“That’s what I worry about,” he said. I think it’s a little too late to worry about Biden over-staying his usefulness, don’t you?

WATCH part of the episode on YouTube here: