80 here. I go to lunches for old coots like me at our local senior center, and based on my expereiences there I’d say that statistically no one our age should be President. There are exceptions, but that’s what they are: exceptions.
That said, this is the choice we have. I’d rather see Eisenhower in the White House, but he has the disadvantage of being extremely dead. No matter what anyone wants, we’ll be choosing between Trump or Biden. Of the two, it should be an easy choice.
As someone who’s pretty conservative in many ways, I like to consult experts. Every few years Siena College surveys historians and political scientists who focus on the presidency. They ask these experts to rank the presidents on a variety of factors, plus an overall one.
In their last poll—which was before the January 6 Event—they ranked Biden a mediocre #19. Not inspiring.
But then they ranked Trump as one of the worst three Presidents in American history. Appalling. And the next poll will include January 6, which I strongly suspect will drop him to dead last. As you might expect from something approaching treason as close as you can get in peacetime.
I’ll take “uninspiring” over “appalling” any day of the week.
Ever since the 2016 election, the Russian/Republican Ministries of Truth have tried to exploit the idealism of the Left to get such folk to not vote, since neither Clinton nor Biden match their ideals. This ploy worked against Clinton, and nearly worked against Biden in the swing states where the two disinformation operations focused their efforts (the Russians being aided by the Trump election campaign sending the Russians micreotargeting geographic data).
Questions like this are in this vein. They prey on liberals’ idealism. Sure they mention Trump as well but Trumpistas can’t be reached with mere facts, while Biden supporters tend towards excessive hand-wringing. 2016 was quite a shock, after all. We still haven’t recovered from that. Not really.
A Norewegian political cartoonist summarized our feelings with a simple image:
