Two confusing historic crises

Sam Smith – Lately, I’ve been struggling with two confusing historic crises: the age of our presidential candidates and the Colorado court case. I know where, as a progressive, I presumably should stand, but I keep asking myself difficult questions.

For example, allowing the Colorado case to stand would certainly seem a fair decision but what would it mean for the future? If state courts can potentially overthrow the popular vote couldn’t the next case involve a state that effectively defeats the Democratic Party candidate? What would be the liberal position on that decision?

The Supreme Court  and others haven’t helped by turning this into a legal question fest that former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner describes as “putting details over democracy.”

I’m also struck by a lack of discussion as to who should be resolving such situations if not the state courts. For example, Tristen Snell has noted, “Our elected representatives convened, heard from both sides and voted that January 6 was an insurrection and that Donald Trump not only engaged in it but incited it. This was the conclusion of 232 of 435 representatives and 57 of 100 senators.”

The other issue is what might happen to our country if the Colorado ruling were upheld. The logic of our campaigns has clearly deteriorated and we are not collectively behaving in the manner that the writers of the Constitution imagined. The Trump campaign is the most dishonest and disrupting one in our history and Wired magazine even reports that it has “obtained exclusive access to data from two separate disinformation research groups that demonstrate a coordinated Russian effort .... to sow discord by pushing the narrative that the US is heading for civil war.”

It strikes me that we too often these days, in our defense, take a profound legal and political approach to things that have huge philosophical and moral factors. We reduce these issues to the same standards we use for divorces and car crashes.

The other example is the question of presidential age. As an 86-year-old who has never thought for a second that he would like to be president, I find the debate strange. After all, if 81 is too old to be president why isn’t 77? Why is this so much more about Biden rather than Trump? Meanwhile, Trump gets away with saying things like: “We have to win in November, or PENNSYLVANIA!!! They’ll have to change the name, Pennsylvania.”

But  Biden’s flaws have attacted more media attention and it’s paid off for Trump.  As the NY Times put it:

 In Times/Siena polling last fall, more than 70 percent of battleground state voters agreed with the statement that Mr. Biden’s “just too old to be an effective president.” More than 60 percent said they didn’t think Mr. Biden had “the mental sharpness to be an effective president.” And fair or not, fewer than half of voters express similar doubts about Donald J. Trump’s age or mental acuity.

Opinion isn’t fact. While it’s fair for the media to cite examples of bad memory, it’s not its job to declare mental capacity based solely on age. As I pointed out recently, one of the writers of our Constitution was an old guy named  Benjamin Franklin. And he saw another aspect of age:

Having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay more respect to the judgment of others.

Our land is collapsing thanks to the moral and practical incompetence of mostly middle aged leaders Let’s judge them and the more senior folks by what they say and do and not just their age.