Third Act Endorses Joe Biden for President

Third Act formally endorses Joe Biden as the clear and obvious choice for President in the 2024 election. We believe in four more years for Joe Biden to advance the work he's already done to heal our planet, our economy, and our polity.

In some ways, it’s almost pro forma for Third Act to endorse Joe Biden for another term as president. Our tens of thousands of supporters, organized in chapters across the U.S., campaign to protect the climate, and to protect our democracy, the two issues where Biden may present the greatest contrast with his opponent.

Donald Trump pulled America out of the Paris climate accords; Joe Biden not only put us back into the international talks but instructed every agency to consider the climate in its work, passed the Inflation Reduction Act to build clean energy across the nation, and just weeks ago ignored the shrieks from Big Oil and paused the granting of new permits for liquefied natural gas, as big a blow as any president has ever delivered to dirty energy. On the democracy front, Donald Trump attempted a coup to overturn the results of the 2020 election; Joe Biden has tried throughout his career to expand voting rights and to protect the civil rights of every American. 

A vote is not a valentine, it’s a chess move.
– Rebecca Solnit

Even in the places where we want Biden to pursue different policies––Gaza, Mountain Valley Pipeline, Willow project––we think his opponent would be far worse. And our members find dozens of other places—from a woman’s right to control her own body to a teacher’s right to pick books for his classroom—where we favor Biden’s leadership. We bear constantly in mind our board member Rebecca Solnit’s advice that “a vote is not a valentine, it’s a chess move.” And in 2024 that move for us is obvious: four more years for Joe Biden, to advance the work he’s already done to heal our planet, our economy, and our polity. So we’ll not just vote for Joe; we’ll work hard to see that Trumpism is defeated. 

But if our support is predictable, we feel nonetheless that we have a particular role to play in this election. Every member of Third Act is in their 60s, 70s, 80s,  90s, or 100s, and so we find that we have something useful to say on what is emerging as a central question in this contest: the role of age in American politics. And in this week, when the Trump adherent who has called him an ”elderly man with a poor memory” testified before Congress, we wish to say that we consider Biden not just competent but wise—more seasoned than eroded by age. 

Age does not disqualify anyone from serving. Obviously one’s body is not as nimble as once it was, but the president does not have to carry sofas up the White House stairs; instead he has to carry the heavy responsibility of governing the country, and the last four years have shown Biden is entirely capable of that job.

We do not support candidates because they are older. In fact, one of our founding principles is to back up the leadership of younger people. Some of us can remember the thrill when John F. Kennedy announced that the torch had been passed to a new generation of Americans: all things being equal, we think it makes sense for those who have long lives ahead of them to set the course for the future. But that’s not the choice this time around—we have two men to choose from, one 77 and the other 81.

And so let us state unequivocally: age does not disqualify anyone from serving. Obviously one’s body is not as nimble as once it was, but the president does not have to carry sofas up the White House stairs; instead he has to carry the heavy responsibility of governing the country, and the last four years have shown Biden is entirely capable of that job. He has, by wide consensus, gotten more done than his younger predecessors, passing sweeping and important legislation despite slender or non-existent Congressional majorities and despite constant obstruction by the GOP. Surely that’s in some part because age brings it with some real advantages, persistence chief among them. Biden has had long decades to understand the governing process; he’s seen what works and what doesn’t. This amounts to what we call wisdom, a trait that societies have always associated with age. It’s not Biden’s gift alone. Consider, say, Nancy Pelosi, who in her 80s was the oldest Speaker of the House—and who, despite or more likely because of her years, managed to hold together her thin majority, pass the COVID relief bill, keep Congress together during the January 6 attacks, and pass critical infrastructure legislation. Compare that to her much younger successors, who are unable even to rein in their own members. 

If you’re an older person try to recall, say, the calendar year your father died. Maybe you can, maybe you can’t—but the deeper question is, can you recall what your father taught you?

Let us also state something else that should be obvious. A president is not president by him or herself. The commander in chief brings along five thousand or so political appointees to do the actual job of running the government. Biden’s choices—many of them young—have been competent and honest. Trump’s cabinet was not filled with people like Pete Buttigieg or Deb Haaland or Jennifer Granholm; instead, he chose cronies to regulate industries they came from, and one after another flamed out in scandal. Under Biden, the U.S. economy weathered the COVID economic whiplash better than any other on earth, precisely because the administration was filled with honest and expert people of all ages who offered good counsel; even by the standards that Trump used (how high the stock market, say), Biden’s team delivered, and there is no reason to think that will change going forward. 

That said, however, we are all too well aware that ageism is real; indeed, it’s perhaps the last permissible prejudice (it’s unlikely, thank heaven, that you’d find late night comics making endless jokes about a candidate’s skin color or gender). The current debate about Biden’s age centers on his memory. The Trump appointee serving as special counsel in the documents case cleared him of wrongdoing but asserted that during a five-hour interview he couldn’t immediately recall the calendar year his son Beau died. Aside from its obvious cruelty, this is a dumb test: if you’re an older person try to recall, say, the calendar year your father died. Maybe you can, maybe you can’t—but the deeper question is, can you recall what your father taught you? 

And it is precisely here that we want to make an affirmative case for Biden’s age—to understand why in some ways it is a remarkable asset. Because Biden remembers, in his bones, the lessons of his life. Joe Biden came of age in a particular America. The first presidential election in which he was eligible to vote featured Lyndon Johnson beating Barry Goldwater. History remembers LBJ’s presidency as chaotic because of his tragic adventuring in Vietnam, but in other respects it was a remarkable moment. The federal government took ambitious steps to advance civil rights, to rein in poverty, attack disease, beautify human landscapes and conserve wild ones, and to back science—these were the Apollo years. Not every project worked, but lots of them did: Medicare and Medicaid and food stamps, for instance. Biden was socialized in a world where governments took on big causes—and you can see this in his first-term commitment to rebuilding infrastructure and boosting everything from solar panels to battery factories. 

Joe Biden not only put us back into the international talks but instructed every agency to consider the climate in its work, passed the Inflation Reduction Act to build clean energy across the nation, and just weeks ago ignored the shrieks from Big Oil and paused the granting of new permits for liquefied natural gas, as big a blow as any president has ever delivered to dirty energy.

His record is quite distinct even from his Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama, who cast his first vote for president in the 1980 election, and who therefore came of age amidst the Reagan revolution with its rejection of government. That experience left an imprint. Obama—wonderfully reflective as always—said as he stepped down that “when I first came into office, I think there was a residual willingness to accept the political constraints that we’d inherited from the post-Reagan era. Probably there was an embrace of market solutions to a whole host of problems that wasn’t entirely justified.”

Joe Biden simply doesn’t have that residual Reaganism; his political makeup had been formed before the Reagan revolution, and it connects clearly back to FDR, the man who was president when he was born. Where LBJ oversaw a booming economy that narrowed the gaps between poor and rich, Reagan made sure that his economic boom benefited the rich, and that those gaps began to widen. Now Biden is back in LBJ mode, and those gaps have—for the first time in decades—begun to narrow again. 

This commitment to the principles of the New Deal—to the idea of America as a group project, not as a series of isolated and individual efforts at personal advancement—has worked well in his first term, and it can work even better in his second. The particular flow of American history makes Joe Biden’s age an extraordinary asset. No one recognizes this as plainly as those of us who share his formative experiences. 

We think most of the critique of Biden is superficial. Even his opponents—Kevin McCarthy, for instance—have testified to his sharpness in discussion and debate. But he looks old: always a stutterer, he’s sometimes soft-spoken, though his State of the Union address demonstrates that he can bring the noise when it is required. Still, the contrast with the ever-bellowing Trump is obvious, because all of what Trump announces with such fervor is nonsense: he will be a “dictator;” Putin should invade our allies; windmills give you cancer. Trump is not just a threat to those around them (he is, remember, an adjudicated rapist); he is a threat to everything that we believe about our democracy, and everything that we love about our country and our planet. 

We trust Joe Biden will make good use of the bully pulpit that is the presidency, speaking with honesty and good humor. But we—and many other Americans—will also speak for him in the months ahead, as loudly and clearly as we know how. Even as we press him for more action on everything from Gaza to global warming, we will back him with all that we’ve got. He has begun to restore confidence in an America that had turned on itself.

We will do all that we can to insure he has another term to restore the country, and the planet, to a place of reason, balance, and decency. A place where all are welcomed and all belong.