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Breaking the Biden Age Taboo
Democrats and the media suddenly discover the President is old.
By The Editorial Board
A pastime around our office in early 2021 was guessing when Democrats would begin to point out that President Biden was too old for the job and should pack it in. The consensus was after a drubbing in the midterm election, but congrats to the colleague (he knows who he is) who figured sometime early this year. He wins the office pool because the drive to shove the President out the door has already begun.
Democrats Suddenly Discover Joe Biden Is 79
The New York Times kicked off the kicking with a story quoting various progressive sages suddenly admitting what everyone has known all along: Mr. Biden is the oldest serving U.S. President at age 79, and he’ll be 82 when he finishes his term. He looks and sounds every bit his age. This declaration of the obvious has now moved along the progressive media chorus line to the Atlantic, with a piece that asserts “Let me put this bluntly: Joe Biden should not run for re-election in 2024. He is too old.”
These stories treat this as a revelation, as if Mr. Biden suddenly showed some dramatic decline. The truth is that the President demonstrated he had lost a verbal, and maybe mental, step in the first Democratic candidate debate in 2019. He hasn’t improved. Democrats admitted it privately at the time, but they rallied to him during the South Carolina primary when it looked like he was the only Democrat who could hold off the nomination of Bernie Sanders and defeat Donald Trump.
The rest of the campaign was a long apologia for Mr. Biden’s strategy of limiting his public exposure by campaigning in his Delaware basement. Covid-19 was the perfect excuse, and woe to any journalist who dared to ask if Mr. Biden wasn’t the same man we knew as Vice President. The subject was taboo.
This was one of the great free campaign passes in history. Ronald Reagan’s age was a subject of agonized media concern when he ran for President at age 69 in 1980. He was roasted after he stumbled in the first debate against Walter Mondale in 1984, and he had to defuse the media and public doubts with a quip about Mondale’s “youth and inexperience” in the next debate.
The Gipper was three weeks shy of 78 when he left office, which was younger than Mr. Biden was when he entered the Oval. If the President runs and serves a second term, he’d be 86 on his final day in the job. But Mr. Biden was needed to defeat Mr. Trump, and so all of this age business had to be ignored in 2020.
Why the Democratic turn now? One obvious answer is that the President is down in the polls, and his low approval rating may cost Democrats control of Congress in November. The problem can’t be the party’s ideas, or Mr. Biden’s adoption of the Sanders agenda after he’d campaigned as a moderate. The problem has to be Mr. Biden. He’s suddenly not up to the burdens of the Oval Office that have aged even younger men. He can’t make the case for his ideas. He’s overwhelmed by crises.
You almost have to feel sorry for Mr. Biden, who saved his party from Mr. Trump but is expendable now that he’s a political liability. You can almost hear Mr. Biden shouting at his staff: Where’s the gratitude? You think Bernie or Mayor Pete would have beaten Trump? I’m the guy who saved democracy.
Mr. Biden can be stubborn, and as anyone with older parents knows, taking away their car keys can be a difficult conversation. The President may not want to leave town as easily as some Democrats want him to.
All the more given the lack of obvious Democratic alternatives to Mr. Biden in 2024. Vice President Kamala Harris would run in a millisecond, but nothing she has done or said since her emergence on the national scene suggests she is up to the Presidency.
Democrats know this, which you can tell by all the stories earlier this year about her political struggles. That’s the Beltway insider way of preparing the field for other candidates to consider running. Not that Pete Buttigieg will need any coaxing.
Such is the price of nominating Mr. Biden with so little scrutiny about his capacity for the Presidency. Perhaps Democrats will avoid a drubbing in the midterms, or he’ll rally after the election by using a GOP Congress as a foil. But Democrats may want to begin looking for candidates far from Washington if they want to retain the White House in 2024.
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This is something I have hearkened on for decades. When did The Fed ever negotiate a soft landing? I have been in the market for well over 50 years and never witnessed this myth. McChesney Martin was the Chairman of The Fed when I came into the business. He was a close friend of my Senior Partner and Founder of Courts & Co.
The Myth of the Central Bank ‘Soft Landing’
Most tightening cycles historically ended in recessions. Whether this shows the power or powerlessness of central banks, it isn’t good news.
Roughly half of the Bank of England’s rate-increase campaigns since the 1950s have ended with a U.K. recession.
“Soft landings” are easier to find in the legendarium of central banks than in historical reality.
It was a big week for interest rates. The Federal Reserve’s supersize rise was followed by the Swiss National Bank’s move to increase borrowing costs for the first time since 2007. Both went further than was expected a week ago. The odd one out was the Bank of England, which nudged rates up less than expected after forecasting a 0.3% contraction in British output in the second quarter.
Consumer sentiment indicators are plummeting across most developed countries. After data showed U.S. inflation hitting 8.6% in May, expectations of inflation a few years down the road actually dipped further. Stocks have plunged into a bear market, and investors have appeared to give up on the notion of a more aggressive Fed bringing down inflation without damaging growth—the famous “soft landing.”
They have an empirical point: This is, being generous, a rare event.
Of the Fed’s previous 12 big tightening cycles since the 1950s, nine ended with a recession, official figures show. Among the exceptions, rates rose consistently between 1961 and 1966 without any downturn, but inflation eased only temporarily and recession eventually struck in 1970. Perhaps the most successful soft landing was in 1983 and 1984, though the economy had just rebounded from two recessions. And then there is the 1994 to 1995 cycle, where there was no surge in inflation at all: Alan Greenspan’s Fed acted for no apparent reason other than to validate the bond market’s forecasts.
The BOE has a better record, but roughly half of its rate-increase campaigns since the 1950s still ended with a U.K. recession.
Do you think the Fed can engineer a “soft landing”? Why or why not? Join the conversation below.
Investors struggle to measure this risk because central bankers don’t seem to have a consistent theory on how they are supposed to micromanage inflation. Modern views are more conducive to the optimistic idea that the economy can be slowed in a “nominal” sense without affecting employment or inflation-adjusted wages. They often focus on how steering the psychology of inflation expectations can restrain price setting in the present. But this has weak backing in data.
Indeed, officials often appear to fall back on 1960s-style explanations, which see cooling the labor market as a necessary step. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, for example, recently described it as tight to “an unhealthy level,” whereas BOE Gov. Andrew Bailey emphasized the need for pay restraint.
If monetary policy does work, then something needs to give—be it weaker credit growth, lower asset prices or a gloomier business climate. That this can happen without affecting anyone’s “real” material conditions is wishful textbook thinking.
To be sure, the power of interest rates over unemployment shouldn’t be overestimated either. Yes, there is a historical coincidence between monetary and business cycles, but this is only natural: Officials tend to raise rates as economies flourish, only to stop when a downturn ensues. The mid-1990s experience is a rare case of monetary tightening without a tightening economy, and the impact was limited.
The overall impression is that extreme rate moves like those in the 1970s and 1980s are likely required to have a meaningful effect. Even if central bankers did initially manage to do just the right amount of tweaking, this would only fix the small component of today’s inflation that isn’t commodity-driven. Headline numbers would remain high, creating an irresistible pressure for officials to keep tightening.
Investors had better hope that a soft landing happens on its own, because central banks’ chances of engineering one don’t look good.
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I see threats every time I wake up in the morning. I am not paranoid. Cynical, yes. However, what I see and fear happen and dictate the direction of our Republic on a daily basis.
If I could align all the threats hammering our society and institutions among the most dangerous would be the intimidation of Capitalists to yield to ESG and Critical Race Theory which is being imposed on our youth in order to make them feel guilty so they hate this blessed country.
I am now discovering in Annual Reports I receive companies I own are advocates of ESG. Whether you realize it or not it is taking over the corporate world. It is being pressed upon management by the Kerry's, Soros's and Davos elitist attendees of this world.
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