The two leading candidates for president are aging before our eyes. And that’s causing some very candid conversations across the media world in the wake of last week’s pivotal presidential debate.
In this week’s episode of Inside the beehive, by MSNBC Chris Hayes noting that at the end of the day, we’re all just “meat sacks,” an immutable truth of life that “hovered around a lot of this debate” within the Democratic Party about whether Joe Biden, next a disastrous performanceis the best choice to make Donald Trump. Hayes commented that Biden had been “degraded”, adding that Trump had “been very clearly degraded”.
“Age is not static,” Hayes said. “It’s dynamic and changing every day.” Hayes, 45, said he felt that reality had been overlooked in some recent conversations about Biden.
In his view, Biden is a remarkable president, with significant legislative accomplishments. “Biden’s one-term domestic policy record is probably the best of my lifetime,” he said. “So you could say he did a great job. Like, Yeah, but do I think this guy should have the most stressful job in the world when he’s 85? And that’s what you’re asking voters to do.”
“It’s a tall order,” he added.
Hayes said the ongoing debate about older politicians needed to take into account the fact that “the spectrum of ageing is very broad”.
“People can have a stroke at 61 and never recover,” he said, and “people can turn 60 and run marathons until they’re 75 and live to be 100. No one knows what’s going to happen. I feel like that perspective is missing from all of this.”
“I know people who are older and one week they’ll be going to a Broadway show and two weeks later I’ll be going to their funeral,” he added. “People talk about age as something static in a way that drives me crazy, both Biden supporters and others. That’s not how it works. Literally.”
Hayes argued that media scrutiny of Biden’s fitness to serve has been “exacerbated by choices the Biden team has made,” namely limiting Biden’s interviews and press conferences.
The relationship between the White House and the press corps has been “more adversarial, in some ways than average,” Hayes said. So “part of what you’re seeing is a lot of pent-up rage from journalists who feel like they’ve been shut out.”
Of course, the post-debate scrutiny of Biden—Hayes called it a “rebellion” within the Democratic Party—“will drive up the poll numbers as much as the original debate. Whether that’s good or bad, I don’t know.”
But it’s certainly different from the move within the Republican Party.
“This is a great moment when you compare the aftermath of the Trump conviction to the aftermath of the debate,” Hayes said. “The aftermath of the debate was probably a hundred times a bigger story … and the reason it was a much bigger story is because the right-of-center media never paid attention” to Trump’s recent conviction. “They said, ‘It’s great that he got convicted. It’s great. We like it. Everybody should get convicted.’”
“The entire Republican Party has just unified,” Hayes said. “So there’s no real story. It’s just, What are you going to do? That’s not what happened with Biden’s debate performance. And so because of that—because the center-left media is broadly interpreted from the mainstream media—which is more argumentative, I think more fact-based, there’s discourse and debate—you’re getting this big story. But I also think that in the long run, that’s a good thing.”
