Why Biden will not run for president in 2024

Soaring gasoline prices. Falling stock markets. Shortages of baby formula. Clogged supply chains. Flight cancellations. School shootings. The border. Crime. Abortion. Ukraine.

All this, of course, is Joe Biden's fault. Blame him for the floods in Yellowstone, the plummeting level of Lake Mead, the flow of the Colorado River, heat in the Midwest. And, of course, the shortage of lifeguards, which, like all ills big and small this discontented summer, “will be a total disaster.”

To critics, everything is a disaster. Forget the lowest unemployment rate in a generation, the ebbing of the pandemic, the US$1 trillion commitment to infrastructure, a black woman on the high court, scores of progressives named to lower courts.

No, no, no. Understand that when things go wrong in the United States, Americans blame the president. It has always been so.

Distemper defeated Gerald Ford in 1976, Jimmy Carter in 1980 and George H.W. Bush in 1992.

As Bowser and Blue, the gifted comedic duo from Quebec once sang: “Not enough money for your vacances tropicale? Blame le gouvernement federal!”

But Joe Biden won't lose in 2024. He won't lose because he won't run. And he won't run because he will be 82 then, and he isn't up to serving a second term.

Biden will follow Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson into “early” retirement. All did not seek re-election (after finishing the terms of their predecessors, who died in office).

Biden's renunciation will be seen as a response to intractable problems. These will devastate the Democrats in the midterm elections in November, when they will lose the House of Representatives, and maybe the Senate.

Afterward, the speculation about Biden's future will begin in earnest. As it did for Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Their parties suffered reversals in the midterms but were re-elected two years later.

If that's the pattern, Biden will reasonably ask himself: If they came back, why can't I? Historically, he would be right. For him, though, declining to run for a second term is less a fear of losing than of winning.

At 80 this year, Biden knows that he has lost a step. So do Democrats, who nonetheless will be reluctant to push him out, or mount a primary challenge, as they did to Johnson and Carter, wounding both.

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic gave Biden a gift: He could run virtually from his basement in Delaware, minimizing public exposure. Next time the peekaboo strategy won't work; he'll have to campaign.

That means gaffes, missteps and tumbles (such as falling off his bicycle the other day). The presidency is not for old men.

Even if Biden is inclined to run, his wife, Jill, will resist. She knows her husband and knows the risks. She is deeply protective.

In the meantime, Biden will insist he is running. That's to preserve his moral authority and prevent rivals (like Gov. Gavin Newsom of California) from entering the field. But it won't silence the cries, laments and whispers among nervous Democrats.

By the spring of 2023, months before the primary season opens, Biden will formally bow out. He'll say it's time to hand power to a new generation.

This is not only about his age and fitness. At some level, as columnist Thomas Freedman suggests, he came to office hoping to unite the country. Now he doubts he can.

Something else: given the threat to democracy from Republicans, in state legislatures and Congress, Biden can argue that by not running he can protect the integrity of the process after a contested election.

Between now and his withdrawal from the race, events may tempt him to run again. He may be impeached, which could backfire badly on the Republicans; the Russians could use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, creating a harrowing crisis; inflation may subside, brightening the public mood.

But it's hard to see anything that will change the reality: age has caught up with Joe Biden, and he won't seek a second term.