Steve Bailey's Blog : Pass the Proverbial Torch

Now that the 2022 midterms are behind us, it is time to start thinking about the 2024 presidential election. I have a suggestion for my fellow Americans, all my fellow Americans. Let's pick candidates from the two major parties that are at least under seventy years old. It is time for my generation, the "Baby Boomers," to stand down and let the next generation take over.

Baby Boomers have dominated the Presidency for most of the last thirty years. Barack Obama was the only respite. It was fine when Boomers were in their forties and fifties, as were Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, but the current party leaders, Donald Trump and Joe Biden are late septuagenarians. While people like me, who are in their seventies, are still capable of many things, I don't think being an effective president is one of them. Unfortunately, neither Trump nor Biden has done anything to convince me otherwise.

To put this age issue in perspective, Ronald Reagan was seventy-seven when he left office. Biden and Trump will be older than that when the 2024 election arrives.

As people age, their brain shrinks in places that have to do with complicated mental activities and processing. Cognition decline starts early and accelerates as we age.

All presidents must continually learn on the job; being the free world's leader is a complicated task. So, it is best to have a fast learner in the oval office. While older people can learn new things, it usually takes them longer than younger people.

It takes energy to be an American president. The demands of the office are enormous. As people grow older, their energy level declines. When stress drains down energy levels, the chance of disorientation emerges, and therefore our seventy-nine-year-old president often sounds confused. This is also why Donald Trump cannot stay on topic during interviews. This is why both are prone to ramble.

Since 1950 the life expectancy of the average American has increased from 68 to 79. There were fewer septuagenarians then. For us aging Boomers, the advances in medicine that make this possible are lovely. I would already be dead without them.

But with this good thing comes negatives. One of them is an increase in cases of Alzheimer's or other forms of dementia. Seventeen percent of people in the age range of 75-84 have Alzheimer's. Both party leaders will be in that age group in 2024. Whether or not they have Alzheimer's, both have already demonstrated obvious signs of some dementia

So, America, let's try aiming for younger candidates. Here are two I would like to propose. For the Republicans, I suggest Virginia's Governor Glenn Youngkin, and for Democrats, California's Governor Gavin Newsom. At fifty-five, both are younger than those who have occupied the oval office for the last eight years

Glenn Youngkin's political debut has been successful because he can attract votes from moderate and MAGA Republicans. Until his presidential ambitions became apparent, Youngkin managed to keep a distance from Trump without offending him or his followers. That Trump recently insulted the Virginia governor indicates that the former president fears Youngkin's ambitions. It is doubtful that remark will pull many Republicans away from Youngkin, and the governor's response to the insult with "I don't roll that way," must attract Republicans weary of Donald Trump's childishness.

Youngkin has pitched himself to the MAGA voters. During the 2022 campaign, he actively supported candidates like Arizona's right-winged MAGA extremist Kari Lake. His dreadful remark after Paul Pelosi's attack was not a blunder. He intended to appeal to the crasser side of the GOP to keep up his Trumpian bona fide. At home, he promotes Republican bread-and-butter issues, and those moderate Republicans who voted for Trump in 2016 but not in 2020 will find Youngkin a suitable candidate.

Gavin Newsom rose through San Francisco's local government, beginning as a popular member of that city's board of supervisors and then its mayor. His political record shows he is a centrist, supporting typical Democrat social issues while encouraging fiscal responsibility. He has promoted business in California, even when such support brings on the ire of unions. His political position could help move the Democrat Party from the deep left field toward the center. It would be difficult for FOX News to portray a pro-business candidate as a socialist, as they are prone to do with many Democrat candidates. Gavin Newsom could draw in those voters who have become alienated from the Democrats by the far-left Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and her "squad."

Here are two possible coeval candidates with similar experiences in life. Both went to college on sports scholarships and have been successful businesspeople. Both have experience as a state's chief executive. The winner of such a contest would become president close to the median age of presidents at the time of inauguration, fifty-five. The needed generational change in the White House would begin.

It would be wonderful if both the former and the current president recognized that their time has come to bow out of presidential politics to enjoy the autumn of their years. But both have other plans. Trump has already announced his plans to run again, and Biden has as much as done the same. It will be up to the American people in both parties to prevent them from becoming candidates.

My father used to say, "In God, we trust because we sure can't trust the people," Come on, America, prove my old man wrong.

BOOK REVIEW

History has not paid much attention to first ladies and Jefferson Davis’ wife, Varina, less than most. The Civil War itself took up most of that space. Still, the woman's story in Charles Frazier’s book Varina is of a woman who married a man much older than herself and did not share in his political philosophy. This mother lost all but one of her children before they had grown up and lived out her life with the legacy of the failed Confederacy that she neither sought nor wholly accepted. This is a framed story, that is, a story within a story. Varina Davis, the only first lady of the Confederacy, tells her life story in a disconnected fashion to a young black man, James Blake, who begins visiting the eighty-year-old widow in a sanitorium where she is trying to recover from drug addiction. Blake wants to understand his own identity as Jimmie Limber, the black child whom Mrs. Davis rescued from a savage beating on a city street in Richmond, Virginia, and took in to be raised among her children. In response to Blake’s questions, Varina starts her story with her escape from Richmond, as this capital of the Confederacy fell to Union troops in the final stages of the American Civil War. She and her husband travel separately from each other physically and in the goals they have in mind for their respective journeys. She wants to escape and not return. Jefferson Davis, on the other hand, delusional that the confederacy had not been thoroughly defeated, wanted to head west toward Texas, where there was a small pocket of resistance, and keep up the fight, a fight that had already cost the American people over 600,000 lives. A climax to this part of the story is reached when Jefferson Davis reunites with his wife in Georgia and, in doing so, brings on the wrath of the Federal troops who were pursuing him. He is arrested, and during this period, Jimmie Limber is separated from the Davises. Varina, whom Frazier refers to as V throughout the book, was convinced that had her husband left her alone, she would have made it to Cuba. Varina Howell was a young woman with no dowry when she met Jefferson Davis at a party in 1843. She was seventeen, and he was thirty-five. For her, it was not about love as much as her need for security. She was more interested in his property and material wealth than his political career or ideology. And yet she stood by him throughout his ill-fated venture as the one and only president of the Confederate States of America and campaigned to have her husband freed from incarceration in Fort Monroe, Virginia, Charles Frazier’s debut novel Cold Mountain, about the journey home of a Confederate deserter in the closing days of the war, came out in 1997 and was a runaway bestseller. It was made into a movie starring Jude Law and Nicole Kidman. He uses a lyrical style, his descriptions are deep, and he puts a lot of meaning in a few words. Varina is Fraizer’s only other book with a Civil War setting. A phraseological slip-up appears when one character uses the expression “no worries,” an Australian phrase that was not part of the parlance of the nineteenth-century American language. Nevertheless, this is an engaging story about a woman few people know much about, probably because she was an outlier in the Civil War drama.

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