The Cocoon Election

Do we really have to do this again?

If you’re the sort of person who tunes into politics for excitement, there wasn’t much of it last night. Unless you’re the kind of nerd whose pulse quickens when you  see Steve Kornacki’s pasty forearms flashing away at the Big Board, trying to break down into granular detail the Nikki Haley surge in Montpelier. All of Grandmaster Math’s (Ari Melber’s nickname for Kornacki) fruitless labors coming in spite of the foregone outcome: Just like all the challengers/supplicants before her, Haley was beaten like a red-headed step-mule. I didn’t need to see the exit polling to know why. Cult followers tend to stick with their cult leader. If you ever find yourself heading up a personality cult — which is all that’s left of my old party now — it generally affords decent job security.

So I tuned out, fixing myself an original cocktail instead: one part arsenic, two parts pentobarbital, with a dash of bitters. Thinking of the eight months that lie ahead  — what will be the longest general election in history —  I made it a double.

They keep telling me it’s the rerun nobody wants to watch. And yet, here we are again. As if we had no choice in these choices.

I’ve been bemoaning the Groundhog Day doom loop for two solid years now, to no avail.  So I’m not going to take this occasion to talk about the enthusiasm gap for Joe Biden. (The latest polling shows that even half of Democrats think one Biden term is enough, even if he hasn’t been all-that-bad a president, when he can find his way offstage. )  Neither am I going to (once again) moralize against Donald Trump.  We have eight months ahead to do that. Instead, I’m going to give him credit. He’s done everything in his power to prove he is unfit for office  —  judges and juries ruling against him on everything from sexual assault to defamation to business fraud, while he’s racked up four felony cases totaling 91 counts against him, and all this, after trying to overthrow his country upon losing an election, while nearly getting his vice president hanged. How hard can a brother work to demonstrate his unfitness?  And yet you  — and you know who you are — chose him anyway. Because Nikki Haley might be too woke, or something?

But I just said I wouldn’t fall down that trap — The Trump Derangement Syndrome trap. A malady his cult followers regularly accuse me of suffering from. (Which, if you’re a faithful reader, you know I always redefine as: I say something true about Trump, his followers become deranged.)  Though I’m not here to tell people things they want to hear, but things that are true. And so if you’re an anti-Trumpster and/or a pro-Biden supporter, you should know this:  No matter how much kiss-your-sister consolation the pundits give you (Trump’s support is soft with independents! Lots of Republicans are voting against him in primaries! Etc. ), the RealClear politics average of national polls shows  two very disturbing things. First, Trump, though only enjoying a 2.2 percentage point average lead over Biden, is running away with poll after poll.  Of the last 30, going back to late January, Trump and Biden have tied twice. Biden has won five polls. And Trump has won 23.

You don’t put much stock in the polls? That’s fine. But maybe you did back in 2020, an election which Biden won handily, despite Trump still maintaining otherwise. Biden underperformed his polling results (his RealClear average was +7.2, and he finished at +4.5 percent).  But consider this in 2024 by way of contrast: Biden won all but four national polls from February to election day in 2020, and he tied in two of the four he didn’t win. What does that mean more specifically? In 218 national polls from February through election day, Biden won 214, lost two, and tied in two.  In other words, the difference between now and then are two exceedingly-different polling stories.  Ignore them at your own peril.  Or at the risk of colossal disappointment if you’re under the illusion that Biden has this election in hand.

“But national polls don’t matter!”  you protest. “Battleground-state polls do.” Okay, cool. But that’s not going well for Biden, either.  He’s currently losing in seven of them.  If you think Donald Trump is a genuine threat to democracy  — which I’m on record as believing — then you have to squint very hard through rose-colored glasses to see the good news for Biden.

But all that aside, as I was watching Kornacki do his electoral voodoo, I started crunching some numbers of my own. Not election numbers, but age numbers. As in: why in the hell are we re-nominating two people who should be eating soft foods in their retirement sun rooms?  Don’t worry, I’m not going to drag them through the indignity gauntlet, replaying all their cognitive slowdown clips, their non sequiturs, their senior/senile moments.  That just seems mean. And besides, these instances are now too numerous to choose from on both counts.

Mind you, I love me some seniors, and hope to be one myself someday. I’ve spent the last three months celebrating the birthdays of my 89-year-old and 80-year old in-laws, as well as my two 80-year-old parents. I respect my elders, and want them to live forever, and not just because I don’t want to be responsible for hosting Christmas dinners with all these grandchildren, nieces and nephews, and various criminal hangers-on skulking around.  Likewise, I have MANY paid subscribers who are north of seventy and eighty. They enrich my life with their correspondence  and comments— plenty of them noticeably sharper than people half their age (probably because they were trained to write in complete sentences, instead of in TikTok captions or emojis). Besides, they help keep me from having to get a job servicing my AI newsbot overlords.

But exactly none of my octogenarian relatives or subscribers are in line to be leaders of the free world, the most taxing and stressful job imaginable. Mostly, my retired family members just putter around the yard or crab at cable news all day, as they should. The rewards of a life well-lived. But now, both major-party candidates are their age and beyond, while trying  to run the world. (Biden would be 86 at the end of a second term, Trump would be not far behind at 82.) And what my Super Tuesday distraction numbers-crunching revealed is that most leaders of the free world were nowhere near that age, and wouldn’t dream of arriving at it.

Unlike Kornacki, I’m no Grandmaster Math. But my back-of-the-envelope calculations reveal an uncomfortable truth, when considering what we’re presently facing. The average age of our presidents leaving office is 60.08 years old. That’s seventeen years younger than Trump is right now, and 21 years younger than Biden. But it gets worse. The average age of DEATH of our former presidents is 71.03 years.  Six years younger than Trump, and ten years younger than Biden, before either of them even begin a second term.  Of course, that average is dragged down by our four presidents who were assassinated in office (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and JFK) — average age 52.25 years old. But even taking them off the pile, we still have an average presidential death age of 73.1 years old, well younger than either of the present candidates.

It is perhaps worth noting that of the 46 people who have held the post of president of the United States, nine percent of them have been killed while doing their job.  It’s not an occupation for sissies. If bus drivers or sales associates had that sort of mortality rate, you’d expect the number of people doing those jobs to drop precipitously.

But my larger point is to say that while we are often billed as being a youth culture — one which is preoccupied by staying young, which anyone who has been born has not quite figured how to do, since we are all hurtling toward death from the moment we draw air outside the womb — we are putting our country in the hands of one of two people who are long-past-prime. Watch a speech or debate from either of them, from ten or twelve years ago, and you’ll see how much they’ve deteriorated. How they’ve grown either much slower or much crazier. (Or both, in Trump’s case). Which should give us pause, even as we tell ourselves these are our two inevitabilities. We have no other choices, because enough people refuse to make them.  (Unless you count RFK Jr., and I don’t.)

In the past, I’ve called this the Groundhog Day election. But it’s more like the Cocoon election.  If you remember that 1985 movie.  I haven’t seen it since it came out, but it left a big impression on me at the time. And not just because Tahnee Welch  — Raquel’s comely daughter — appeared naked in it for half a second. (This predated the internet, so as a teenage boy, you had to take nudity where you could find it.)  But the Ron-Howard-directed film captured our imaginations back then— a group of elderly people rejuvenated by aliens. Enjoy the trailer if you haven’t seen it:

Seniors considered that a triumph of the human spirit. A brace against aging. And even as a 15-year-old, it gave me hope, too. And yet, most of the “seniors” in that movie, as the website Soul Sanctuaries detailed, weren’t nearly old enough to run for president in modern America.

At the time of filming, Don Ameche was 76. Hume Cronyn was 73, and his real-life wife Jessica Tandy was 75. Maureen Stapleton was only 59. And the gruff-but-lovable Wilford Brimley — also known as the Quaker Oats guy — was a mere 50 years old at that time. He appeared to be well beyond his years, even then.  (He died in 2020 at age 85.)

But being a politically conscientious American now means denying reality, of the actuarial-table sort, and otherwise. (The average life expectancy for U.S. men has fallen to 73-years-old.)

So let’s just keep hoping for the best, despite our iffy choices.  Maybe our unsubstantiated optimism will finally catch up with us.

Bonus Track: As a cranky, middle-aged Gen X’er, I’ve tried to make it my business to hate young people. On two grounds:
1. They are our replacements.
2. What the hell do they know anyway?

But in the last several years, I’ve begun to think they might have a better chance of getting right what we’ve repeatedly gotten wrong.  If only out of disgust with their elders.  Never underestimate the healing power of spite.  In that spirit, here’s my favorite song from the Thin White Duke, “Young Americans.”  In this live version, that’s David Sanborn playing sax, and the late, great Luther Vandross singing back-up. (Standing on the far-left side. Vandross came up with the background-vocals hook for this tune.)