Like many, I watched the first presidential debate in utter shock, peeking out from behind my hands at times. I was troubled by the fact that the president, who often benefits from low expectations regarding his addresses and public events, and who had a week of preparation, completely fell apart. But it’s motivated me to try to craft a pragmatic, reasonable way out of this: one that has historical precedent and is not fodder for those clamoring for drama. Because, deep down, this was not a great debate surging with drama and power struggle – this was a human debate, exposing flaws inherent in us all. 

As I lay this out, I feel it’s important to be upfront about my allegiances and potential biases: I’m an ardent Democrat. I believe the Democratic Party is America’s best hope for preserving the core institutions that have made this country great, I lament the decades of little steps that led to the Republican Party’s current flirtation with authoritarianism, believe Donald Trump to be one of the worst presidents in our history, and I also think Joe Biden may be the best president of my lifetime (I’m 28, you do the math).

I’ll also acknowledge that the age thing has never bothered me. Part of that is probably a result of my own bias – like I said, I genuinely think Joe Biden has been a great president and I want him to continue serving for four more years. But part of it is also an understanding that the executive branch is made up of thousands of people rather than just one man, and that the job the president does is owed to the hard work of all of those individuals. This president has done a remarkable job of staffing a pretty resourceful administration, and I have yet to hear a Democrat raise a sincere issue regarding Vice President Kamala Harris’ competency that doesn’t reek of sexism or racism. She’d be a perfectly fine president – she’d protect a woman’s right to choose, support Ukraine, and promote the policies I’d expect a Democratic politician to support. In other words, if – God forbid – the worst should happen, I am comfortable with her stepping in. It may be unrealistic for me to expect every American to feel the same way about President Biden’s age, but I hope it gives some context to where I’m coming from.

For years, I have asserted, often against the grain of the pundit class, that Biden should run for reelection. I said this even as Biden became an unpopular president, even as he began flagging in polls against Donald Trump, and even as polling in swing states became particularly dire. I’ve based these feelings, which I maintain, on several things: incumbency advantage; the utter chaos that would result if the Democrats were thrown into a competitive primary or contested convention; the fact that Biden tends to poll better than potential Democratic alternatives; and, simply, that Biden has been a good president with a strong record to stand on. To paraphrase the much more eloquent Michael Lovito, who has written similarly: a failure to renominate Biden would be a high risk endeavor without a clear better outcome, and in a presidential race, you should do everything you can to minimize risk. 

All of these things can (and probably are) still true: even today, carrying forward with Biden is the best option. But I’m worried. Biden has flagged in the polls for months longer than I expected, his debate performance was a nightmare, and – despite the fact that Democrats continue to do well in special elections and Republicans have continued to demonstrate they are uniquely unwilling to rise to the challenge and clean up their act – there’s no getting around it: the problem might be Joe Biden.

Last night, I felt helpless. My sentiments roughly boiled down to a realization that I genuinely didn’t know what advice to give the Biden campaign at this point. As someone who rarely fails to have an opinion, this was untenable. It finally occurred to me this morning that I should try to do what we always do here: ignore the unprecedented options headlines are already pounding you with, and instead present a prudent reflection on where we stand, and provide some precedent based on historical analogy. 

2008 and “A More Perfect Union”

About this time in 2008, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright controversy wracked Barack Obama’s campaign. Wright was Obama’s former pastor – he had officiated his wedding and the baptisms of the Obama children. In early 2008, it came to light that Wright had delivered some controversial sermons, whose excerpts were critical of America’s post-9/11 policy, suggesting America had brought 9/11 on itself, punctuating his sermons with cries of “God damn America.” Though Obama quickly distanced himself from Wright, the issue never fully faded, and Obama was hounded about it by the press and Republicans alike. What ultimately happened is nothing short of political legend, and what I want you to think about when it comes to the modern conundrum facing Biden. 

In a speech titled “A More Perfect Union,” Obama spoke passionately about race in America and the failings of liberty and justice in a nation founded with slavery and subsequently plagued with racism. Though he condemned Reverend Wright’s speeches, he contextualized them, imploring empathy, confronting racism and the lived reality of many Americans of color. One of the more powerful parts of the speech is rife with a hallmark of the Obama era, an unwillingness to turn Americans against each other as he discussed Reverend Wright and race generally:

I can no more disown him than I can disown the Black community. I can no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother — a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of Black men who passed her by on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

By reflecting on his own lived experiences, a need for common empathy, and addressing the issue head on, the Obama campaign received applause, moved on, and put the concerns to rest. It was uncharacteristically direct for a campaign (and later presidency) which is now often recalled (and criticized) as disappointingly staid and perhaps even publicly naive when it came to these sorts of issues. But it was also something people desperately want from their politicians: incredibly honest, deeply personal, and inherently relatable. More than anything else, it put concerns about Obama’s affiliation with this anti-American worldview and kind of rhetoric to rest.

President Biden is at his Jeremiah Wright moment. The campaign which has brushed aside this issue for too long, ignored the president’s most glaring vulnerability, and is now facing defeat at the hands of a dangerous man needs to rise to the occasion. This is what I think it could look like.

Biden’s Reverend Wright Moment

As soon as humanly possible, the campaign should announce a major statement. The kind of thing that, at this point, many Americans would tune into because they – inundated with opinion pieces – honestly may think the president is about to withdraw from the 2024 election. 

The statement should be given in a cozy, homey environment, surrounded by family. President Biden should come out, sit down in a chair with family members around him, and talk as off the cuff and earnestly as he can. My medium hot take is that Biden’s off-script moments are among his more likable, perhaps because they’re perceived as earnest and unstilted. If you watched the address Biden gave immediately after the debate, he was an entirely new person, speaking before an audience and walking around. Far better than anything a week of debate prep generated.

But, rather than focusing on where or how he says it, it’s what he says that will matter. Biden should deliver a statement about the realities of getting older, and it should go something like this:

Like nearly one in five Americans – 60 million of our parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, friends, and loved ones – I’m old.

There’s nothing I can do about that, I cannot make myself younger or control my age any more than you can. But I can talk to you about the lived experience of aging that we often overlook, but that – as Americans are living longer than ever, well into our 80s, 90s, and even into a century – millions of Americans face every day.

We pledge to support senior citizens as they retire, we provide them healthcare, retirement benefits, and the opportunity to age gracefully and with dignity. It is often a promise we leave unfulfilled, because we are uncomfortable thinking about our senior citizens as anything other than a voting bloc. There’s something about our society that wants to put the elderly away, in a home. We are uncomfortable with aging and the lived realities we must all confront, but trust me, folks, it helps no one to ignore it.

So I want to talk to you about my own experience with aging, how I live my day, and provide answers to what worries you about my own age. Whether you’re decades away from retirement, my age, or blessed to be even older than I am, it’s something we cannot shirk anymore. 

There are good days, when I don’t feel old, where I hop on the bike in the morning and greet the day with optimism. Sure, I have to take more vitamins than I used to and pharmaceuticals which are still too expensive, something that makes lowering their prices near and dear to my heart.

And there are bad days where I feel stiffer, where it’s harder to walk down stairs than it used to be, and where my voice is raspy and tired. It’s not that I don’t want to work, or that I don’t continue to work, it’s just harder. The stutter that I’ve fought since childhood is harder to push through. It’s funny, my grandchildren call me “grandpa cranky” on those days, but being surrounded by loved ones always makes the bad days better. 

There’s never a day where I don’t feel confident and capable of being your president, where I don’t finish intelligence briefings, or meet the challenges of the day with a perspective gained from decades of experiences and lessons I’ve gleaned by serving you, the American people. Even on the worst day, if my back hurts and I don’t feel like getting on the bike, I rise to the occasion and dignity required of this office.

For some reason, we don’t acknowledge this, but especially as we age, we need help. There are people and families all across America who need help, if they have a daughter confined to a wheelchair, an uncle struggling with mental illness, a father addicted to drugs, or a grandparent who needs help getting into the shower. I am grateful that I’m able to move around on my own, but there are hundreds of thousands of Americans who cannot, who need daily care, and for whom we give too little. 

Folks, this is why I’m a Democrat. This is what the Democratic Party stands for: helping you, helping people. Not just as they age, but as they grow; as they face all of life’s challenges, big and small. If you can’t afford glasses, or a wheelchair, or insulin shots, or treatment for addiction, or even getting a college degree, you deserve the same dignity as any other American. There is no shame in needing help sometimes, we all do. To think otherwise is frankly un-American. Even in the darkest times, at the brink of world war, when struggling homeowners couldn’t pay their mortgages, when Americans were treated differently because of the color of their skin, we have risen to the occasion and helped each other.

Age has brought me context for this. I’ve learned what makes us uniquely American, what brings us together to help each other. I’ve seen fascism and Communism crest and fall, I’ve seen democracies shaken to the core, and the march towards justice ebb and flow. I am worried about the state of democracy and these great power struggles of our time both because I see them, and because I saw these same signs decades ago. We were all taught as kids to look up to our elders, to gain knowledge from them and listen to their stories, to learn from them lest we make the same mistakes ourselves. But all too often we put them out to pasture and look the other way. Senior citizens deserve better than to be shuffled off, because when you reach that age, you deserve to be treated with dignity too.

Age, and time, is the neverending march that comes from us all. There is no shame in it, and the better we can be at talking about it upfront, the easier time we’ll have confronting the challenges and opportunities that come with age. I am just as guilty of this as anyone. I wanted to ignore my age because I didn’t always feel old, but I’ve learned that ignoring it just ignores the conversations we all need to have. I may be older, but that brings with it the knowledge and the empathy for those who need help, for those who undertake the natural course of life, and who deserve support. It’s taught me about the unspoken of experiences we all will face as we get older, and that we need to give nurses and home care workers a raise, and recruit more of them. Age even comes with the mindset I believe can make for a good president: someone who cares about their fellow citizen, who knows it takes help to get through life and a village to depend on, who can rely on lived experiences to contextualize major decisions, and someone who has seen far too much suffering to have emerged without empathy for what many Americans go through on a daily basis. 

I lost my wife and one-year-old daughter when I was 30. That was 50 years ago. Not a day goes by that I don’t wish they would have made it to 81, 85, 88, or even just a couple more years. Not every American is fortunate enough to live out to their full potential, but my eternal promise to them is that because I can, I will live up to it. I will never stop fighting for you. I am not finished with this job, and I am able to do it, even if I walk a little slower than I used to. 

Every step I take, every decision I make, is driven by the memory of those I lost and the commitment to make life, at all stages, better for all Americans. That is what this campaign is about, and I look forward to getting on the trail and making that point. God bless you, God bless the United States of America, and God bless our troops. 

A speech like this, which confronts what many, many Americans feel – perhaps fairly so – is a serious issue for the president, might just break through. Like Obama’s speech on race, it’s honest and open; it confronts an issue every American has some experience with by embracing it head on, instead of hiding and hoping it goes away. Maybe it reassures some Democrats, maybe it fails to convince anyone at all, but we’re at a precarious moment, and when all else has failed it may be time to fall back on the truth: we will all age, we all need help, and empathy for the entire human experience matters. This is a subject which deserves a national dialogue, and President Biden is uniquely suited to rise to the occasion and be the one to start it. He may just save himself on the way.