University Diaries » ‘This is the man the Democratic Party says will be fully able to function as president for five more years through the age of 86. No one rooted in human reality believes it, or should believe it.’

Andrew Sullivan (no link) tells Biden to step aside, and he’s got a point.

Yes, Trump is almost as old as Biden. But he has the energy and stamina and obsessiveness of the truly mentally ill. I started to read his interview this week with Hugh Hewitt, and yes, it was a festival of delusion and lies and occasional decent points. But what struck me also was the zeal, untempered by time, the persistent, angry passion, the untiring drive to regain power. He is not what he was, and, appearances to the contrary, is mortal. But up against Biden, he seems like raw energy.

… Trump now has the aura of the American outlaw, a victim of the Biden DOJ, a man on the run. Look at that mug shot. He’s trolling the Constitution. I once wrote about Trump in the context of Shakespeare’s Richard III: it’s hard not to root for the monster in some mischievous way.

I get all that. I don’t quite get this:

[W]hen I think of the presidency right now, it feels like an empty space. The drift so many now feel as religion recedes from American life, as social media eats away at any sense of the common good, as all the worst elements of society are replayed on our phones over and over, is palpable.

I’m not palpating it. I see plenty of healthy civic activism – environment, reproductive rights, gun control – in large parts of this country. And since when does the recession of religion equal destructive drift? Looked at Norway lately? Looked at any list of the best countries in the world by any measure you’d like? Not a non-secular one among them. OTOH I won’t waste your time listing the God-fearing catastrophes. I mean, break it down by state. Among the worst elements of our society are the fundamentalists and the bigots breathed air into by Trump, and I agree with Sullivan that Biden’s a dangerously weak candidate to go up against them.

**********************

UD‘s very keen, if we’re talking Biden-subs, on Buttigieg, and not just because he’s read Ulysses (his father was a Joyce scholar). Unflappable, likes a good fight, smart as a whip, likeable, YOUNG, serious, military background, politically experienced, sense of humor. Americans are even willing to vote for intellectuals lately (Obama)! But I fear they’re not yet, in sufficient numbers, willing to vote – at the level of the presidency – for out gay people.

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Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
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Notes of a Neophyte

Gordon Young Says:
October 28th, 2023 at 9:08AM

From time to time, somewhat depending on what’s going on in the world, I come back to visit this site. Just wanted to say that it’s sad for me too, for very many reasons, that Buttigieg very likely will never be President.

Greg of Way-Yore

Margaret Soltan Says:
October 28th, 2023 at 10:26AM

Gordon: I often ask myself if there’s any way in hell Buttigieg could get there – he’s so impressive. But the country’s not ready for him.

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