Last night’s Met Gala in New York fielded a feast of celebrities from Rihanna to Margot Robbie to Kim Kardashian and Bill Nighy. America’s political version of the Big Night Out took place at the Washington White House Correspondents’ dinner — with a tide of cocktail events and policy chinwags washing around it for several days. This week in Washington feels like the recovery zone from an event which has returned to full hoopla after the pandemic and a long sulk by Donald Trump, who declared it “so boring and so negative” (ie about him) that he snubbed it three times to host a “very positive rally” instead.
It’s no coincidence that Joe Biden launched his run for a second term in the White House just before the event. It was a chance to be seen side by side with a vice-president, Kamala Harris, with whom his relations have been strained, and to address the presidential elephant in the room: his age. The aim is to get unwelcome talking points dealt with, so that it becomes old news by the time the election race begins in earnest next year.
Humour, on these occasions, allows a thorny topic to be addressed obliquely. Roy Wood, the “roast” comedian of the banquet, pointed out that while “in France, they rioted when the retirement went up to 65, here we have an 80-year- old man begging us for four more years of work.” Biden shot back that though many people thought he disliked Rupert Murdoch (92), “that’s simply not true. How can I dislike a guy who makes me look like Harry Styles?”
Behind the heavily engineered speechwriter jokes lies an awkward truth: there are few enthusiastic “Bidenites”, even among his support base of centrist Democrats. But there are plenty who feared that not having the President as candidate, despite the obvious risks of his age, would be a less secure bulwark against the return of Trump and attendant menaces.
A vice-president to add diversity (of gender, race and age) to an elderly male ticket is de rigueur. Democratic party decision-makers have been fearful of revisiting schisms with the Left on identity politics. In fairness to Biden, he has closed those pretty well, by being steadfast on protecting abortion rights and deflecting divisions among progressives on transgender rights by turning the topic to an attack on the “MAGA extremism” embodied by Trump.
So Kamala Mark II it is — despite an uninspiring stint as Biden’s deputy. To the question of whether she is qualified to be the figure that is a “heartbeat away” from the presidency, the answer is clearly not. One way to handle awkward questions, though, is not to ask them.
The late actress Elizabeth Taylor mastered this art when asked in her later years about the sizeable age gap with her much younger, eighth husband, replying shortly, “If he dies, he dies.”
Biden’s attempt to stay in the Oval Office is predicated not on being exciting but on having bested Trump once and being the best bet to do so once more, as other Republican contenders fall by the wayside.
He is also far from alone in belonging to a club of world leaders who are in their later years as the pendulum has swung from vital youth — Bill Clinton was 46 on taking office, Barack Obama 47 and John F. Kennedy just 43 — to the “old school”, literally. Biden was 78 when first elected and Trump 70.
Autocrats also tend to hang around, because transitions are a weak point in unaccountable regimes. President Xi of China became a septuagenarian in June and Vladimir Putin passed the milestone last year. But age does not always coincide in politics with being dull — Ronald Reagan’s “morning in America” era began when he was installed, also nudging 70 at the inauguration. In the unelected power ranks our own King formally takes the throne this week at 74.
America is shaping up to its 2024 choice — a warhorse with a set of acceptable values, chiming with blue-collar voters and the more pragmatic end of the radical coalition. It is not the worst settlement, when so much else is going awry. It does, however, leave a generation gap looming. An excess of grandfatherly maturity in the global system does leave younger voters ruled by a generation far away from their own concerns and experience. That cannot go on forever — even if it sometimes feels like it will.
Anne McElvoy is executive editor at Politico
