OMG! Joe Biden Didn't Recognize George Clooney!

Why Old Joe Biden Is Old News, And Also Irrelevant

I don’t want to read the new book about Joe Biden, and stories about his age have joined my “skip these” rank, which includes any headline with the names “Diddy,” “Kardashian,” “Loomer,” “Stefanik,”…it’s a long list.

But I’m not too bothered by the news that Biden didn’t recognize George Clooney, or that he confused his health secretary, Xavier Becerra, with his homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas. It’s worth remembering that Joe Biden wasn’t the first president to flub such an ID.

From The New York Times archive about an encounter a previous president had with his only Black Cabinet member:

President Reagan was making his way down a line of mayors visiting the White House, shaking hands, when he came to Samuel R. Pierce Jr., his Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

'Hello, Mr. Mayor,'' Mr. Reagan said to Mr. Pierce.

Presidents live in a bubble that is unimaginable to outsiders—it’s possible that even world-famous actors don’t get more than a passing synapse from the presidential brain cells. If the face in front of them isn’t a member of their immediate family, it can all be a blur.

Speaking of brain cells, I’ve advised giving yours a break and following your own internal guidelines about which stories you’ll skip, making room for the ones that make my Beloved Print Edition of the The New York Times such a joy.

Here are two—‘A Priceless Inheritance’: Preserving Memories of Black Life in Memphis (which I can broad-mindedly realize looks even better online) and The Small, Tight-Knit Religious Order That Molded Pope Leo XIV. I’ve been following stories about the election and background of the new pope like it was a presidential primary.

When the Pope was first elected, I began a post for this newsletter that was mostly meant to share this great quote from Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson,

"Everything dope, including the Pope, comes from Chicago!"

But I also wanted to make the point that the choice of a Pope who can talk to us in English about his mission is no accident. We’ve never had that kind of Pope on TV.

Donald Trump is not going to like what Pope Leo says on television, nor will he be happy with the attention he’ll lose to someone who outranks him in the pantheon of celebrities.

FRESH HELL Tina Brown's Diary

makes a similar point,

The ascension of Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost to the Holy See feels like a brilliant celestial move by his predecessor Pope Francis to create not just a rival moral center from the U.S. to counteract Trump, but one who can draw even bigger crowds and command instant mega-headlines.

Now it seems that what Donald Trump really, really wants—since he can’t be Pope—is the Nobel Peace Prize.

But all Joe Biden wanted was to be a good president. As usual, I agree with

Taegan Goddard

who writes to his members some thoughts on the Biden book:

• Just because Donald Trump acts more energetic than Joe Biden doesn’t mean he’s more mentally fit. He’s been incoherent, conspiratorial, and increasingly detached from reality. The press should treat his cognitive state with the same level of concern.

(I’ve come out and said he’s stupid).

But I’m not entirely on board with this:

• Biden was a consequential president—especially in his first two years. But his decision to run again was catastrophic. The June 2024 debate with Trump wasn’t just a bad night; it was a seismic political event that likely cost Democrats the election.

I totally agree that Joe Biden was a consequential president, especially thanks to the most consequential House Speaker we’ve ever seen, Nancy Pelosi. But I’m not completely sure that his decision to run, and things like the terrible, no good, horrible really bad debate were so seismic.

If Biden had gotten out earlier but still endorsed Harris, leading to a cluster bleep of a Democratic primary, one of two things would have followed.

1. Harris gets beaten up in that cluster bleep but still wins the nomination.

2. Someone else is nominated—Gavin Newsom? Would he have been any less vulnerable to being tarred with the label of “California liberal?”

I don’t think an earlier Biden exit would have mitigated some of the things I shared after the election (along with a mea culpa for getting everything so wrong):

• Financial Times columnist and chief data reporter John Burn-Murdoch writes, “Every governing party facing election in a developed country this year lost vote share, the first time this has ever happened.”

• Or, as newly re-elected Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Pérez, considered one of the most vulnerable Democratic incumbents in the House explained, “People are putting their groceries on their credit card. No one is listening to anything else you say if you try to talk them out of their lived experiences with data points from some economists.”

• “The Democrats have not connected with disaffected and pissed-off voters, even though they have implemented or proposed measures that aid them, David Corn writes in Our Land. “They certainly don’t echo and reinforce these voters’ outrage that the economy is not producing enough high-wage jobs for non-college-educated workers or their anger at elites who benefit from the status quo. Trump does, and, for them, that’s enough.”

• His victory was fueled largely by the support from Latino and Hispanic voters, particularly Latino men. The Guardian reports, “There seems to be an attraction to Trump among Latinos, Latino men, that could be a kind of defensive reaction to his aggression and aggressive rhetoric,” said Guillermo Grenier, professor of sociology at Florida International University. “It could be they’re saying: ‘I’m not one of them, you know? I’m an American citizen, I’m voting for you, I’m not the rapist scum, I’m not with them. That’s the other guys, the other immigrants, not the voting immigrants.’”
  

And now, according to Politico,

There’s an untold storyline in the growing chatter around the youth gender gap: Young men of color are largely driving the phenomenon.

Despite the conventional wisdom that young people are more progressive than the generations before them, President Donald Trump grew increasingly popular with young men, while young women moved to the left.

Data from the Cooperative Election Study, which is the largest academic survey focused on American elections, showed that the percentage of young white men, ages 18-29, who voted for the Democratic presidential candidate dropped from 64.3 percent in 2020 to 57.9 percent in 2024. Meanwhile, the gender gap among young white men and women who voted for the Democratic candidate is just 3.2 percentage points.

It’s a completely different story for young men of color, according to the CES. The percentage of young Black, Asian and Hispanic men who voted for the Democratic presidential candidate dropped 18.8 percentage points in the span of four years, from 76.1 percent in 2020 to 57.3 percent in 2024. There’s also been a drop in support for the Democratic candidate among their women peers — 85 percent to 77 percent — but there’s still a wide gap between the two groups’ Democratic support: 19.7 points, to be exact.

Would Donald Trump have been any less successful in riding any of the racist, misogynist, grievance and hate-fueled waves he used to build a new electorate if Joe Biden had left the race any earlier?

We’ll never know for sure, but I don’t think so.

None of us—no voter, author Democratic consultant, pundit or Substack commentator can imagine what it’s like to give up on a second term as president. There’s no ambition like presidential ambition—there probably isn’t even a word for something that only the handful of humans who’ve served as President have ever experienced.

It took a lot for Joe Biden to look in the mirror and acknowledge his shortcomings. Do I think he made the right decision? Yes I do. Does the extent to which he was impaired by age back then matter now? What do you think?