The 2 main candidates for president are getting older proper in entrance of our eyes. And that’s inflicting some very candid conversations all throughout the media world within the wake of final week’s pivotal presidential debate.
Throughout this week’s episode of Contained in the Hive, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes famous that on the finish of the day, we’re all simply “flesh sacks,” an immutable reality of life that “hovers round a lot of this” debate throughout the Democratic Get together over whether or not Joe Biden, following a disastrous efficiency, is the most suitable choice to tackle Donald Trump. Biden is “degraded” Hayes remarked, whereas including that Trump “has very clearly declined.”
“The character of age is that it’s not static,” Hayes noticed. It’s “dynamic and it modifications from each day.” Hayes, 45, mentioned he appears like this actuality has been ignored in a few of the current discuss Biden.
In his view, Biden has been a exceptional president, with important legislative achievements. “Biden’s one-term home coverage document is arguably the perfect of my life,” he mentioned. “So you may say he’s been doing an excellent job. It’s like, Proper, however do I feel that this man ought to have the world’s most tense job when he’s 85 years outdated? And that’s what you’re asking voters to do.”
He added, “That’s a troublesome ask.”
Hayes mentioned the continued debate about aged politicians ought to keep in mind that “the spectrum of chance for getting older is so large.”
“Individuals can have a stroke at 61 and by no means get well,” he mentioned, and “individuals can flip 60 and run marathons till they’re 75 and reside to be 100. Nobody is aware of what’s gonna occur. I really feel like that perspective has been lacking from all this.”
“I do know individuals who had been aged and one week they had been going to a Broadway present and two weeks later I used to be going to their funeral,” he added. “Everybody retains speaking about age as static in a approach that’s driving me insane, each the Biden individuals and the opposite individuals. That’s not the way in which it really works. Actually.”
Hayes made the case that the media scrutiny about Biden’s health to serve has been “exacerbated by selections the Biden individuals have made,” particularly to restrict Biden’s interviews and information conferences.
The connection between the White Home and the press corps has been “mutually hostile, in some methods greater than common,” Hayes noticed. So “a part of what you’re seeing is plenty of rage pent up from journalists who’ve felt like they’ve been frozen out.”
After all, the post-debate scrutiny of Biden—Hayes referred to as it a “revolt” throughout the Democratic Get together—“goes to drive polling numbers as a lot as the unique debate. Whether or not that’s good or dangerous, like, I don’t know.”
But it surely’s positively totally different than the dynamic throughout the Republican Get together.
“That is such an incredible second while you evaluate the aftermath of Trump’s conviction to the aftermath of the controversy,” Hayes mentioned. “The aftermath of the controversy has been possibly 100 occasions as massive a narrative… and the explanation that it’s been a a lot larger story is that the center-right media by no means batted a watch” at Trump’s current conviction. “They had been like, It’s superior that he was convicted. It’s nice. We like it. Everybody ought to be convicted convicts.”
“Your entire Republican Get together simply unified,” Hayes mentioned. “So there was no actual story. It was similar to, What are you going to do? That has not been the case with Biden’s debate efficiency. And so due to that—as a result of the center-left media broadly construed from the form of mainstream media over—is far more disputatious, I feel extra reality-based, there’s discourse and debate—you’re getting this big story. But in addition I feel that is in the end, in the long term, a superb factor.”
