Dead Man Walking: The Zombie Candidacy of Joe Biden

 That shuffling, clanking noise you’re hearing louder and louder? It’s not the ghost of Dickens’s Jacob Marley – it’s the creaking re-election campaign of President Joe Biden.

 This weekend, the New York Times, in conjunction with Siena College, released a damning poll on the president’s 2024 run, headlined “Warming Polls Flash for Biden.” The Times poll found that Donald Trump is now beating Biden by five points, with only one in four thinking the country is going in the right direction and a majority of voters saying the economy is in poor condition. Biden is even losing support among women, black and Latino voters, the core groups of the Democratic Party.

 A follow-up Times report was also dismal for Biden, with 61 percent of those who voted for Biden in 2020 now saying he’s “just too old” to be president for a second term. This Times finding was backed up by other recent polls, including one  conducted by Bloomberg News and another by NBC News, which found that a whopping 76 percent of those polled expressed concern about the president’s age and fitness.

 Clearly, the anxiety about President Biden’s mental acuity, which started as a propaganda meme on Fox News and other conservative media outlets, is growing like kudzu.

 Over the weekend, the opening skit of Saturday Night Live even featured the theme, with California Governor Gavin Newsom (a slick-haired Michael Longfellow) and others Biden supporters dutifully singing the praises of the aging commander-in-chief, including his remarkable physical prowess, stamina and even tech wizardry. Unfortunately, a clueless President Biden (Mikey Day) was then shown botching FaceTime on his cell phone.

 The nervous chattering about the president’s advanced age grew louder last month when Robert Hur, the special counsel investigating Biden’s retention of classified material, excused his behavior by stating he’s a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” a double-edged sword if there ever was one.

 If Biden is re-elected in November, he will beat his own record as the oldest sitting president, turning 86 at the end of his second term. Trump is only four years younger, but he comes off as pugnaciously energetic, and recent polls have been kinder to him. According to the Times poll, only 19 percent of voters think Trump’s age would prevent him from serving a second term.

 The white knuckles among Biden supporters will be very evident on Thursday night when the president delivers his State of the Union speech before a joint session of Congress and a national TV audience. Will Biden project leadership and vitality? Will he seem mentally alert? Can he read his prepared text off the teleprompter?

 The bar for Biden is strikingly low. And yet it’s very high. His opponents – and the general public – will not just be watching for his usual gaffes, but signs that he is losing it. That’s he’s not fit to be our chief executive.

 As I’ve written here before, the Democratic establishment would be wise to replace Biden with a stronger candidate. The trouble is that the party has become a nexus of powerful corporate forces and is strongly opposed to any insurgent candidacy that can breathe new life into the presidential race. The Democratic status quo resisted the presidential challenge of Senator Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, as well as the campaigns of Jesse Jackson, Bernie Sanders and RFK Jr., who was forced to leave the party and become an independent candidate.

 As political pundits generally agree, the Democratic Party has a Biden conundrum. They can’t turn to Vice President Kamala Harris because her poll numbers are even weaker than the president’s. Nor can she easily be replaced by her “good friend” Newsom or other Plan B favorites like Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, because they are white and they lack national name recognition.

 “Biden must save Biden from himself,” as progressive filmmaker Michael Moore recently commented on Rumble. “It’s the only way to ensure Trump never sets foot in the Oval Office again.”

 The problem is that the doddering -- yet determined -- Biden is not going anywhere. And there are no “wise men” in the Democratic Party to tell him to step down.

 “There is no council of elders and I’m not sure if there was that an incumbent president, no matter who it was, would listen to them,” David Plouffe, a former campaign strategist for Barack Obama, told Peter Baker, the White House correspondent for New York Times. “He thinks, ‘Hey, I won and I beat the guy who’s going to run against me and I can do it again.’”

 Evan Osnos, a political correspondent for The New Yorker, reports the same Biden stubbornness: “I will tell you that my reporting really almost astonished me with how this man has no doubts… He believes he is the only one (who can beat Trump)…. (This) level of conviction is going to go down in history as either having been an extraordinary case of resisting all of what he would call the chattering class…or it will go down in history as having been a terrible miscalculation.”

 Former President Barack Obama, you say – he can advise Joe it’s time to go. After all, Biden was his loyal wingman when he was vice president. The two men are said to have a good relationship. Maybe Barack can convince Biden that only, say, Michelle Obama can save the nation from Trump 2.

 But Obama is not very persuasive. He couldn’t even get Ruth Bader Ginsburg to step down as a Supreme Court justice when he invited her to a White House lunch in July 2013. Instead, the proud Ginsburg died at 87 during Trump’s reign and he promptly filled her lifelong seat with 48-year-old, right-wing, fundamentalist Amy Coney Barrett.

 Come to think of it, Biden apparently resented it when President Obama told him it was Hillary Clinton’s turn to run for president in 2016. So maybe pushing his wife as a Biden replacement in 2024 would not be a good idea.

 We’ve all seen this horror movie. The mummy is about to rise from its sarcophagus and strangle our hero. Look out, you want to scream! Nobody wants a Biden-Trump rematch. It’s a nightmare from which we can’t wake.

 If only there was another presidential candidate out there. Somebody to inspire us, to awaken our better angels. Oh wait --- there is!

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