there's more:
"“What I’m really saying is not specific to him—it’s a generational argument. I don’t know many people in their mid-70s who are as young and energetic as Joe Biden, but our government should represent all of us. We have a lot of people who represent the older generations, and I think we need more people who represent younger people,” Moulton told me this week, on a layover on his way to campaign in Nevada. He recalled how confused senators were last year about how Facebook works when they called Mark Zuckerberg in for a regulatory hearing last April—and those senators were, for the most part, younger than Biden. “I think he’s a very sensitive guy, but our national-security challenges right now are drones and artificial intelligence and space warfare; I don’t think people look to the Vietnam generation as the generation that’s going to figure that out.”
Everyone else so far who’s made the age arguments against Biden has made them very carefully. Seth Moulton, the representative from Massachusetts who launched a presidential campaign late and has been swinging hard to get in, has a line that he uses all the time about how it’s time for the generation who voted for the Iraq War to move aside and be replaced by the generation who fought in the Iraq War. This isn’t very subtle: Biden supported the war, and Moulton is a decorated Marine who served four tours, but it’s an attack that Moulton is making after a few years of being a favorite of Biden, who included him in the group of young veterans in Democratic politics who reminded him of his late son Beau.
Biden’s team feels confident that his greatest strength in the campaign is that people know him to be a decent man. But voters have never gone for anyone they knew anywhere near as well as they know Biden, or anyone who’d been in politics as long. Jonathan Rauch, a fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank (and an
Atlantic contributing editor)
coined in 2003 what he calls the “14-year rule,” which found that every president since the beginning of the 20th century had been elected president or vice president a maximum of 14 years since his first election. Biden would pass the 14-year rule three times over, with five years to spare.
With Biden, he said, “I don’t think we’ve ever seen that kind of staleness before—either he’s nonviable if you believe the 14-year rule, or he completely blows the rule out of the water.”
Trump has called Biden “sleepy” and said “he looks different than he used to, he acts different than he used to, he’s even slower than he used to be,” prompting Biden to respond in Iowa a few weeks ago, “Look at him and look at me and answer the question.”
Eric Swalwell of California, who was still in diapers through Biden’s second term in the Senate, called for Biden to pass the torch (it’s printed on his campaign merchandise)—by citing a speech that Biden gave in 1986 calling for the torch to be passed to the next generation. “I’m still holding on to that torch,” Biden said, and a mini-melee erupted onstage. South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who has been talking for more than a year about how he doesn’t think Democrats can win by saying “back” or “again,” tried to get in with, “As the youngest guy on the stage, I feel like I probably ought to contribute …” before being cut off by Sanders saying, “As part of Joe’s generation, let me respond.” The moderators gave the time to Sanders, who argued that the question was about ideas, not age.
The contrasts can play out within a few minutes, like at that Planned Parenthood forum, when a woman spoke emotionally about having three abortions after being assaulted by an ex-husband and while in the military, pressing Biden on how he
changed his position on the Hyde Amendment. Biden’s initial answer struck some in the audience as patronizing, given who would be in the crowd at a Planned Parenthood primary event. In short, he made the issue about him: “First of all, a lot of you women, maybe a lot of the men out here don’t realize what incredible courage it took to stand up and say that—because the fact of the matter is that when you recall … The reason I wrote the Violence Against Women Act in the first place, and I wrote it, was because of what I’ve seen, what I understand happening, going into neighborhoods and communities and it knows no color, it knows no bounds, it knows no ethnicity. For you to stand and recall that, brings it all back immediately.”
What he said after that, though, went further. Biden spoke passionately about how he thought that the woman’s ex-husband should be in jail. He cited statistics about transgender women being killed. He stumbled a little bit—much like he stumbled at the debate last Thursday, still trying to keep up with staff who have been pushing him to squeeze his senatorial answers into 30 seconds—but told the woman he wanted to talk with her in person backstage and learn from her about what he didn’t know.