The left-wing media appears to finally be ready to acknowledge some of President Joe Biden’s shortcomings — as one New York Times columnist has published a piece admitting that the president is so “unpopular” and “decrepit-seeming” that he could “easily” lose to former President Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election.
In an op-ed published on September 9, Ross Douthat declared that “Joe Biden is an unpopular president, and without some recovery, he could easily lose to Donald Trump in 2024,” adding that “it’s been hard to distill a singular explanation for what’s kept his numbers lousy.”
The piece was titled, “Why is Joe Biden So Unpopular?” and cites several potential reasons — including persistent inflation and the constant agitation from the far-left activist core of the Democrat Party. However, Douthat mainly focuses on the issue of Biden’s advanced age and lack of “vigor.”
My Sunday column: Why Is Joe Biden So Unpopular?: https://t.co/7pvVygFau5
— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) September 10, 2023
According to the New York Times columnist, the “big problem” could potentially be “simmering anxiety about Biden’s age.”
“Maybe his poll numbers dipped first in the Afghanistan crisis because it showcased the public absenteeism that often characterizes his presidency,” Douthat continued. “Maybe some voters now just assume that a vote for Biden is a vote for the hapless Kamala Harris. Maybe there’s just a vigor premium in presidential campaigns that gives Trump an advantage.”
He went on to note that there is no way to elevate a different leader with the exact same policies who may have more popularity among the American people — and thus, “all Democrats can do is ask Biden to show more public vigor, with all the risks that may entail.”
Douthat then wrote that it would be difficult for the 80-year-old president to lift the “pall of private depression and general pessimism hanging over Americans, especially younger Americans, which has been worsened by Covid but seems rooted in deeper social trends.”
According to Douthat, Biden cast himself as a transitional figure to a “more youthful and optimistic future.” However, the New York Times columnist does not see the optimism and doubts that Biden is able to inspire it.
“But wherever Americans might find such optimism, we are probably well past the point that a decrepit-seeming president can hope to generate it himself,” he wrote.
The New York Times isn’t the first left-leaning outlet that has acknowledged the reality of Biden’s advanced age in recent weeks, as NPR recently admitted that the optics of the president’s decision to board Air Force One on shorter stairs to lessen the chances of him falling “draws attention” to his age — which they deemed “one of Biden’s greatest political liabilities.”
