So, do you think Joe Biden is too old to be president?
We’ve been talking a lot about Biden this week because of his dust-up with Donald Trump. You will remember that the former vice president told a gathering of college students that if he and Trump “were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.”
Trump then responded with a tweet saying that if they rumbled, “Crazy Joe Biden” would “go down fast and hard, crying all the way.”
This was actually not all that bad by our current presidential Twitter standards. Anything that doesn’t involve the size of his nuclear button is just normal life.
And the entire quarrel was actually one of the least depressing pieces of news from the week. Really, would you rather contemplate two of the highest-ranking officials in modern American history talking smack, or John Bolton?
The squabble inevitably brought up the question of whether Biden was going to try to challenge Trump in 2020, when he would be 77. Looks like he’s interested. The other two constantly mentioned Democratic possibilities are Bernie Sanders, who’d be 79, and Elizabeth Warren, who’d be 71.
Of course, Trump would be 74. And a Biden-Trump matchup would be a good way to illustrate my own personal theory of aging, which is that people can keep getting better at their work as time goes on, but that at some point it gets much harder to switch to a whole new skill set.
This is why Donald Trump as president is just a reality TV star with a different address. If Biden had the job we’d get that good old veep with veto power.
So age doesn’t seem like that big of an issue. And it’s nice to have a chance to start evaluating the possible Democratic contenders — if only to distract us from the fact that we’re still just a quarter of the way through Year 2.
Biden’s take-Trump-out performance came during an emotional talk to students at the University of Miami, as part of a campaign against sexual assaults on college campuses that was started in the Obama administration.
This is a tender subject for Biden. There’s always got to be the memory of how he had failed to step up when Anita Hill was telling her harassment story, making him both the man who helped give us 25 years of Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court, and a Judiciary Committee chairman who failed to chide fellow senators for suggesting that having to listen to your boss talk about breasts is no big deal.
So he threw himself into the subject and told the students how he’d like to be back in high school so he could beat up the “guy who ended up becoming our national leader” for saying he could “grab a woman anywhere and she likes it.”
It is not actually a good idea under any circumstances to advocate an assault on the president of the United States, even if you don’t refer to him by name and restrict your threats to stuff that might have happened back in junior year.
And Biden couldn’t let it go at that. “I’ve been in a lot of locker rooms my whole life,” he said. It was a disconcerting segue for those of us who have learned over the last few years to cringe whenever a politician starts discussing conversations around the lockers.
“Any guy who talked that way was usually the fattest, ugliest S.O.B. in the room,” he concluded. It was a reminder that Biden has a tendency to put even noble sentiments in a distracting way.
So as a president, we’d probably get a man who could be expected to occasionally … talk strange. Like the time he complimented Barack Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. …”
Of course Trump had to jump right in. This is a man who once got into a Twitter war with the father of a college basketball player who failed to thank him for the fact that his son was released from jail in China. (“Ungrateful fool!”)
After Biden announced he was yearning to beat the president up, Trump came back with his crying-all-the-way retort. And inevitably the nation started envisioning a septuagenarian face-off, maybe in WrestleMania. Or preferably Claymation.
Who won the verbal war? I’d vote for the former vice president, if only because he seems to have gone quiet. It’s been days now and we have not had a single new Biden remark to complain about. Trump, meanwhile, was busy tweeting about Crooked Hillary and threatening to “VETO” the spending bill, shortly before he announced he was signing it.
Also, presumably, waiting to see what shoes would drop over the weekend. If Joe Biden got into trouble over campaign financing, it wouldn’t be over the legality of giving hush money to a porn star. Not the kind of plus mark we are used to considering in a presidential contest, but here we are.
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