Nate By Nf Mp3 Download
Eleanor Heidecker
Thanks for being the adult in the room. Which, ironically, is required of younger people these days. I hope we can do this with dignity and decorum. Yep its time to take grandpa behind the barn. Both of them.
Maybe it\u2019s because I\u2019m a statistically-inclined sports fan that I recognize the inevitability of age-related decline. Build a projection system like RAPTOR or PECOTA, and the backbone is what\u2019s called the \u201Caging curve\u201D. Major league athletes improve rapidly through roughly age 22, improve more slowly from age 23 though 25, peak from about age 26 to age 28, and then enter a decline phase. There is some variability in this last part, especially with modern medicine, training regimens and sports science. Some players manage to extend their peak into their early 30s or even their mid-30s. And there\u2019s some variation by position and by sport. Positions that emphasize leadership and cognitive skills, like being a point guard or a quarterback, usually age more gracefully than those like running backs that rely on raw physical talent.
But the decline comes for everyone, sooner or later \u2014 and sometimes it comes suddenly. Think Michael Jordan with the Wizards. Peyton Manning with the Broncos.1 Babe Ruth hitting .181 in 72 at-bats in his last major league season. Tiger Woods repeatedly missing the cut. One of my favorite sports memories was watching Serena Williams from high up in the 300 level on an electric late summer night at Arthur Ashe Stadium in 2022. Clearly lacking the mobility she once possessed, she gave everything she had to eke out a win over Anett Kontaveit, the No. 2 seed in the tournament, in a thrilling three-set victory. Then she lost in the next round to an unseeded Croatian-Australian player named Ajla Tomljanovic. The win over Kontaveit was the last of her career.
Cognitive decline is harder to measure, and varies a lot by the precise skills required by the job. Physicists and mathematicians seem to peak earlier than economists, for instance. Tasks that benefit from life experience and the ability to build social relationships can peak later still; the average Fortune 500 CEO is age 58. But almost no CEO apart from Warren Buffet is Joe Biden\u2019s age, 81.
Other than perhaps some COVID stuff, nothing has made a certain type of politically-engaged Democrat angrier at me than my insistence that Democrats needed to take the electorate\u2019s concerns about Joe Biden\u2019s age seriously. To be fair, I wasn\u2019t even that early on the case; the first time I wrote about my concerns was last September. By that point, it had become clear that Donald Trump was likely to be the GOP nominee again. And had become clear that an overwhelming majority of voters thought Biden was too old to be president. At that point, Biden at least still had a narrow polling lead against Trump \u2014 but he relinquished it later that month and has never really regained it, at least not for a sustained period.
It wasn\u2019t just that voters were incredibly consistent about mentioning Biden\u2019s age in polls: it was also two other things. First, that voters had a pretty fucking good point. As anyone who\u2019s had an aging friend or relative knows \u2014 which is to say, almost everyone \u2014 the late 70s and early 80s are often a sad point of decline. They\u2019re frequently an inflection point past which people have good days and bad days, but can\u2019t carry out day-to-day tasks to the same degree of consistency and fluency that they once had. It\u2019s also the age at which the risk of death begins to exponentially increase:
And it\u2019s not just that Joe Biden is 81 now \u2014 it\u2019s that he\u2019s seeking a second term and wants to continue being president until he\u2019s 86! Michael Jordan wasn\u2019t awful with the Wizards, but he also wasn\u2019t about to ask for a four-year contract extension. An 86-year-old president is a ridiculous and untenable proposition. Few world leaders are anywhere close to that old, other than in authoritarian countries \u2014 and none of them are the American president, the hardest job in the world.
Is an 86-year-old Biden being president as ridiculous and untenable as an 82-year-old Trump being president? (Trump just turned 78 so would be 82 by the end of his second term.) For me, the answer is still no. In fact, although this is an increasingly unpopular view, I think Biden\u2019s had a pretty good first term. And if I lived in a swing state2, I\u2019d still vote for Biden \u2014 if for no other reason than because I think January 6 is so disqualifying to outweigh everything else.
But an 86-year-old president would be disqualifying under any other circumstance. And I can\u2019t really blame any voter for thinking otherwise. In a political environment full of misinformation and distrust, that Biden is 81 and seeking to be president until he\u2019s 86 is something rare: an unassailable, objective fact. If I were a single parent supporting three kids on a minimum-wage job, who barely had time to follow the news, could you really fault me for thinking the one thing I know is that this guy is too fucking old to be president?
The second thing I realized in September was that this wasn\u2019t the sort of thing Democrats were going to be able to spin their way out of. Not when there were still another 15 months to go in the campaign. They weren\u2019t going to be able to duck the question by blaming ageism or blaming the media \u2014 not for 15 months.
There were two things that might save Biden. First, that Trump is also really unpopular \u2014 and also really old. Even now, I suppose I think Biden has some chances if he remains in the race \u2014 but surely they\u2019re lower now, probably by quite a lot, than the already-low 35 percent chance that Biden woke up with in the Silver Bulletin forecast this morning.
I\u2019m not really in a mood to critique Trump\u2019s debate performance, which was stronger than I\u2019d expected but also included lots of wild, rambling tangents that only seemed coherent in comparison to Biden. Trump never won a post-debate poll in any of his three debates against Hillary Clinton or his two against Biden in 2020. But he absolutely crushed Biden, 67-33, in CNN\u2019s poll of debate-watchers. How bad do you have to screw up to lose a debate by 34 points to Donald Trump in a country as divided as this one? And yes, these polls historically do have some predictive power in anticipating movement in the horse race, especially with a result as lopsided as this one.
The other way out is if Biden had consistently been able to deliver vigorous and crisp performances in his public appearances. Notwithstanding his other electoral liabilities, Bernie Sanders \u2014 also aged 82 \u2014 at least seems roughly as sharp as he\u2019s always been. But Biden is a shadow of himself. This is the most obvious thing in the world \u2014 and it was obvious before tonight. Seriously, go ahead and watch clips comparing Biden\u2019s 2012 debate performance against Paul Ryan or even one of his 2020 debates against Trump to virtually any of his recent prolonged public appearances. Republicans, predictably, have begun to weaponize the issue and if Biden remains on the ballot, Democrats ought to be deeply worried about an \u201COctober surprise\u201D in which Republicans simply run clips of Biden then compared to Biden now.
Instead, Biden has been graded on an incredibly generous curve, like after his substantively fine but poorly-delivered State of the Union address. And the White House has been playing hide-the-ball, from Biden\u2019s declining to do a Super Bowl interview to reducing the number of debates from three to two to using executive privilege to block the release of the audio of Biden\u2019s interview with special counsel Robert Hur \u2014 who concluded that Biden was an \u201Celderly man with a poor memory\u201D and was pilloried for it, even though Hur had been appointed by the White House\u2019s own Attorney General, resistance hero Merrick Garland.
White House staffers who unskew the polls showing Biden trailing, charlatans selling you \u201Chopium\u201D, columnists who predicted (!) that Trump was going to drop out of the debate (!!) \u2014 if you\u2019re a Democrat, you should be angry at these people for putting you in this predicament. The same goes for special interest groups who insisted that Kamala Harris ought to be VP \u2014 against Biden\u2019s initial instincts \u2014 even though she\u2019d just run one of the most underperforming campaigns in primary history. Without that, Democrats would have a better set of options, or Biden might not have run again in the first place.
Maybe Biden can still win. There\u2019s certainly some point above zero at which I\u2019d buy his stock, although he\u2019s fallen to just 23 percent on Polymarket. But he was already behind, he\u2019s very likely to fall further behind as a result of the debate, and \u2014 don\u2019t neglect this \u2014 he still has four-plus months of campaigning (and one more debate) to go, and will have to survive what will be both relentless media coverage and unsparing Republican attacks against his age on every slow news day between now and November.
Maybe Biden could survive by playing prevent defense \u2014 although the White House has been trying that and it hasn\u2019t been working \u2014 if he were leading. But instead he\u2019s behind. And once the polling fully accounts for the effects of the debate within a few weeks, he\u2019s likely to be as far behind as he\u2019s ever been, with less time left than he\u2019s ever had. How is the man you saw on stage tonight supposed to turn things around? Or even a 30 percent better version of the man you saw tonight? Sure, it\u2019s possible. But is that really the bet you want to make if you\u2019re a Democrat who thinks Trump is an existential threat to democracy and everything else?
I may have some further thoughts in the coming days on how I\u2019d begin to benchmark a replacement\u2019s chances against Trump. Under ideal circumstances \u2014 if Biden had stepped aside a year-and-a-half ago and made way for a competitive primary \u2014 I\u2019d think such a Democrat might be a favorite against Trump, who, to repeat, remains quite unpopular himself. Democrats are narrowly ahead on the generic Congressional ballot. And their Senate candidates are generally polling quite well \u2014 almost always much better than Biden is in the same polls \u2014 another point that the poll-unskewers have conveniently neglected.
c80f0f1006