Jim Geraghty:

Over in The Atlantic, 67-year-old Eliot Cohen argues that Biden is too old to serve another term. This isn’t that shocking; Mark Leibovich wrote something similar in The Atlantic about a year ago. Biden isn’t listening, and apparently very few Democratic elected officials have the guts to publicly say they agree, although apparently plenty will say so off the record or on background.

But Cohen makes a useful observation about the unusual dynamic of the White House when the oldest and most experienced person at the table is the president himself:

As president, he has surrounded himself with former aides and dutiful technocrats — no peers who can look him straight in the eye and say, with the gravitas born of expertise and self-confidence, “Mr. President, I profoundly disagree.” Perhaps this is what he has always done, but it is particularly striking now.

Now, Biden’s cabinet includes a few figures who, in theory, could say that sort of thing to him, such as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellin and Attorney General Merrick Garland. But if they ever do push back against Biden’s instincts or ideas, they’re awfully quiet about it, with one or two rare exceptions. A lot of the top White House officials have spent much of their careers with Biden — Secretary of State Antony Blinken, national-security adviser Jake Sullivan, economic adviser Jared Bernstein. White House counselor Steve Ricchetti joined Biden’s staff in 2012, and senior adviser Mike Donilon has been advising Biden since 1981.

Then again, it’s fair to wonder if the fairer complaint is that the 80-year-old “famously indecisive” president — CNN’s description, not mine — has a staff of yes-men, or whether Biden is a yes-man to his staff.

As far as we can tell, there is no senior figure in the Democratic Party who’s willing to insist upon a meeting with Biden and tell him, privately, that he’s too old to do the job anymore, or that he soon will be. Former president Barack Obama isn’t interested in doing it, although apparently he’s always had not-so-hidden doubts about Biden’s abilities and good judgment. Nor are Democratic congressional leaders such as Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries interested in having that conversation. Figures such as senators Patty Murray of Washington, Ron Wyden of Oregon, and Dick Durbin of Illinois arrived in the Senate in the 1990s and have known Biden for more than three decades. But as far as we can see, none of them are close enough to Biden to get away with telling him, “Old friend, you’ve had a good run, but now it’s time to pass the torch to the next generation.”

The one person who raised the issue of Biden’s age, memory, and mental acuity on the debate stage in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary was former HUD secretary Julian Castro, and shortly thereafter he was cast into the Phantom Zone and never seen again.

We’re living in an odd era of full of power, ego, and ambition, but little or no authority. We have figures who are well-known but not particularly respected. There aren’t many political leaders whom we can trust to put the national interest ahead of their personal, political, or partisan interests. There are no E. F. Huttons anymore, figures who speak rarely, but are widely listened to when they do speak.

There’s no one around with the stature and earned authority to tell California senator Dianne Feinstein that it’s time to retire and step down. There’s no one who can pull Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman aside and tell the senator that he ought to prioritize his recovery and spend time with his family, step down, and let Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro appoint some able-bodied replacement. You would think Biden would be the figure who could step into that role, but maybe he’s afraid to bring up the issue of which figures are too old or too infirm to perform the duties of their elected office.

The worst-kept secret in Washington is that Vice President Kamala Harris — last seen babbling incoherently in an effort to articulate what culture is — is not ready to either be the Democratic presidential nominee in 2024 or to serve as vice president for another term, and has demonstrated no ability to get ready.

Biden reportedly thinks she’s incapable of taking work off his desk. The New York Times reported earlier this year:

In private conversations over the last few months, dozens of Democrats in the White House, on Capitol Hill and around the nation — including some who helped put her on the party’s 2020 ticket — said she had not risen to the challenge of proving herself as a future leader of the party, much less the country. Even some Democrats whom her own advisers referred reporters to for supportive quotes confided privately that they had lost hope in her”

Washington has no Democratic Party elder statesman who could sit down with Harris and say, “You’ve had nearly three years to grow into the office, and you’re just not cutting it. The party is terrified that if Joe had a heart attack, you would lose to Trump in the general election. For the sake of the country and the party, you need to find some excuse to step down and allow Joe to replace you with some indisputably competent and confidence-inspiring figure.” (Good luck on determining who would qualify as that figure, but I notice Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar, Colorado senator Michael Bennet, and former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick all lasted longer in the 2020 Democratic primaries than Harris did.)

Obviously, there are no remaining Republicans who have the stature or even the will or interest to attempt to rein in Donald Trump’s most reckless and self-destructive impulses. Trump burned through the elder statesmen in his first term — crafty old veterans such as James Mattis, John Kelly, and H. R. McMaster. They volunteered to work for Trump, hoping they could steer him in a better, wiser direction. Every last one of them burned out, grew ever more frustrated, and determined the effort was pointless.

Trump resents and lashes out at anyone who doesn’t tell him what he wants to hear — cabinet officials, lawyers, staffers, longtime aides. As I wrote last November, “Trump is a reflexive contrarian with zero impulse control, which means that he’s always metaphorically sticking forks into electrical sockets after he’s been warned not to, just to prove he doesn’t have to follow anyone else’s rules. He resents instruction and limits much more than he fears electrocution.” Trump’s uncontrollable impulses make the presence or advice of any elder statesmen moot.

The anti-Trump forces on the right have plenty of old politicians — the Bush family, the Tea Party governors of the early Obama years, a small army of diplomats and retired senators and House members. The problem is that only a small minority of the right-of-center grassroots is interested in listening to them anymore.

There was a time when heads of the Department of Defense, or law-enforcement agencies, or intelligence agencies approached that kind of elder-statesman, not-so-partisan, trusted-voice status. Figures such as James Comey jumped into the #Resistance pool with enthusiasm, laughing along with Stephen Colbert on late-night television and looking silly on social media. Retired intelligence officials have become just another batch of (often left-of-center) talking heads, people who were often professionally trained to lie persuasively and are now trusted to provide accurate insight, often shaped by sources and information that the rest of the public cannot access.

At the start of the pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared ready to step into the role of an elder statesman. But by June 2021, he was insisting, “A lot of what you’re seeing as attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science.” (“La science c’est moi.”) And his testimony about funding gain-of-function research turned out to be at best highly misleading and at worst lying under oath.

The disappearance of elder statesmen occurred alongside the collapse of public faith in all kinds of institutions: government as a whole, public school, public-health officials, law enforcement and the criminal-justice system, churches, the media, big corporations. No one sees any reason to heed anyone else’s advice or to accept anyone else’s assessment over their own gut instinct. In theory, that kind of independence could be a good thing, an antidote to groupthink and a sort of libertarian ideal where every figure in our government and public life exercises their own judgment on determining the right path.

In practice, it means every major figure trusts their own judgment on what to do at any given moment, and constantly mistakes their personal interest for the national interest. Feinstein and Fetterman are apparently convinced the Senate can’t operate without them. Harris is convinced she’s ready to be commander in chief at any moment and that she’s doing a great job, never mind that she has a job-approval rating that is the lowest for any vice president in U.S. history. Trump is convinced he doesn’t need to listen to anyone else, and Biden is convinced he’ll be completely capable of handling any crisis that comes his way in his mid-80s.

On Capitol Hill, maybe Iowa GOP senator Chuck Grassley comes closest to being an elder stateman today. At a time when a lot of older elected officials have become cranks, Grassley’s public persona and Twitter feed are cheerful, funny, and wholesome. (What really sticks in Grassley’s craw is how the programming on the History Channel so rarely deals with history anymore.)

Maybe Mitch McConnell is in the ballpark of that status, but it’s difficult to be an elder statesman and a leader of your party simultaneously. McConnell knows the rules of the chamber inside and out and has figured out how to turn old primary rivals into allies, but it’s hard to be considered a trusted elder statesman when so many Americans see you unfavorably.

It is possible to have too much public faith, and too much trust, in leading figures and institutions. But right now, we’ve got the opposite problem. It’s near impossible to be a leader when no one wants to follow.