Vote for Joe – he’s too old to go to work

Whatever else you can say about this year’s Presidential election, it has given a boost to those of us in the Third Age. In Europe, Presidents and Prime Ministers get younger, but in the land of the free, they are getting older and older. It looks now all but certain that septuagenarian Donald Trump will be opposed by an even older man, either Joe Biden (78) or Bernie Sanders (77). The other Democratic likely candidate going into Super Tuesday, another man nearer eighty than seventy, is multi-billionaire Mike Bloomberg, who has now apparently failed in his attempt to buy the Presidency.

It’s quite a turnaround. Sixty years ago, the candidates were Richard Nixon and John F Kennedy, both in their forties. This side of the Atlantic, our Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, was sixty-six, the French President, General de Gaulle, was seventy, and the West German Chancellor, the redoubtable Dr Konrad Adenauer, was eighty-four. We could still regard the USA as a young country in those days; now one is tempted to think it geriatric. This year’s election will be contested by men who may have difficulty in remembering what day of the week it is.

There is nothing much to be said about President Trump. We have all become familiar with his vagaries and his tweets, which often suggest disengagement from reality. Anyone who calls himself a “very stable genius” is a candidate for what Wodehouse called “the booby hatch” where he might tell you he was Napoleon if he knew, or could remember, who Napoleon was. Or perhaps a poached egg.

Bernie Sanders appears to be still in possession of his marbles, or at least most of those he ever had. He seems to have an appeal to American youth, rather as our own unlamented septuagenarian Jeremy Corbyn had for over-stimulated crowds at Glastonbury. All the same, in his better moments he calls to mind our own former favourite Leftie, Michael Foot, as he campaigned in 1983 with the fervour of an Old Testament prophet for a manifesto which one of his own Shadow (or shadowy) Cabinet described as “the longest suicide note in history”.

In Sanders’ wilder moments, which are by no means infrequent, you feel that Bernie should be standing on a soap-box in whatever is Washington’s equivalent of Hyde Park Corner, screaming that the End of the World is nigh – unless his fellow-countrymen vote for a Socialist Paradise, that is. That message didn’t work for dear old Footie, and I doubt if it will work for Bernie either.

And so, we turn to 78 year-old Joe Biden, the great survivor of American politics. Joe started running for the Presidency when the current French President Monsieur Macron was in short trousers, Margaret Thatcher reigned in Downing Street and Angela Merkel was still a citizen of the German Democratic Republic behind the Iron Curtain. Joe’s judgement wasn’t too good even then: he thought it a bright idea to plagiarise a speech of Neil Kinnock’s. Even the Democrats thought this wasn’t a smart thing to do and he was forced to pull out of the 1988 race for the Democratic nomination.

But Joe has an Irish tenacity. He didn’t give up, kept trying and was rewarded with eight years in that annexe to the Corridors of Power known as the Vice-Presidency. He is still going. He may have difficulty in being sure which state he is campaigning in, and certainly finds it hard to remember his lines or even to read them correctly on the autocue. So what? Ronnie Reagan, the last Good Ol’ Boy to have settled comfortably in the Oval Office, had the same difficulty, and he rates as the most generally popular President since Eisenhower, aka “the Great Golfer”.

Joe may be vague as vague can be these days. Like many of us who are, as the former Bishop of Edinburgh Richard Holloway puts it, “waiting for the last bus”, he may frequently come into a room and wonder what the hell  he has come in to get or say. But does this really matter? He has three things going for him. First, he’s likeable, an agreeable old thing. Second, he’s neither  a megalomaniac like the present tenant in the White House nor a disturber of the status quo like Bernie. Third, there’s no evidence that he wants to do anything. He just wants to get behind the President’s desk in the Oval Office. Should he get there, he might sleep as much as silent Cal Coolidge.

It would surely be a relief for the USA to have an inactive do-nothing President. His rivals, Trump and Sanders, are old men who want to make waves and leave their stamp on the world. Joe has no such dangerous ambition. Whoever wins, the White House is going to be an old folks home for the next four years; better surely to have an inmate who won’t break the windows or set the place on fire. He will be an “aw shucks” President. It’s difficult for a President to do much good, easy for him to do harm. Joe will do neither.

In Raymond Chandler’s novel “The Lady in the Lake” there’s an old Sheriff, also, I think, called Joe whose election pitch is  “Vote for Joe – he’s too old to go to work.”

“Vote for Joe and a quiet life” – not a bad slogan. The USA needs a dull President and four dull and tranquil years. Nobody but Joe can offer this.