Age is the flip side of longevity, and it has finally gotten in the way of Joe Biden. The US president announced on Sunday, July 21, that he will not run for re-election against Donald Trump in the November 5 presidential election. This withdrawal opens up an unprecedented period of uncertainty for his camp just a few weeks before the Chicago Democratic National Convention due to start on August 19. But it also puts an end, at least temporarily, to a spiral that threatened to sweep the party into an electoral rout.
Without his stubbornness, Biden would never have become, at 78, the oldest president in US history. Long underestimated, in 2016 he was unable to run after Barack Obama, whose loyal vice president he had been for eight years. Obama considered that the time had come for a female president, Hillary Clinton. Biden's image as a defender of blue-collar workers in a Rust Belt devastated by globalization and subsequent de-industrialization would have been a far better barrier to Trump's nationalist populism than that of an out-of-touch elitism conveyed, unwillingly, by the former Secretary of State (2009-2013). Biden took his revenge four years later, defeating a dozen candidates in his own painstaking but tenacious way.
But this obstinacy gradually backfired. It led him to ignore the first signs of age, the falls, lapses, and blunders, which he had always been accustomed to, but became, in his eighties, a merciless barometer of his ability to exercise the function of president of the world's leading economic and military power. For months, voters, including Democrats, had decided against him. Within his party, defections turned into a hemorrhage after the painful debate with Donald Trump on June 27, during which his weakness came to the fore.
When he campaigned in 2020, Biden had presented himself as a "bridge" to a new generation of Democratic leaders. Then he forgot about this commitment, obsessed as he was by the threat to American democracy posed by Trump, who had returned from the opprobrium of contesting the presidential election results. He defined himself as the best bulwark against the former businessman, without seeing that his age had become a greater cause for concern for his fellow citizens. The energy deployed by the Republican in the seconds following his assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on July 13, locked Biden a little further into an impasse, accentuated by the fact that he tested positive for Covid four days later.
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