Politics in the United States has been getting curiouser and curiouser since 2016, when Hillary Clinton, fully prepared to replace Barack Obama in the White House, unexpectedly lost to Donald Trump. And then Trump, in his inaugural address in January 2017, spoke in a vein that was a rude departure from his predecessors, Presidents who had disseminated the message of unity from the same platform.
It was a chaotic presidency Trump operated. He appointed cabinet members and advisors in dramatic fashion and then dismissed them through tweet messages. He then lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden but refused to accept the results, with the consequence that today he faces as many as ninety-one charges under four indictments. No American former president has been charged with criminal offences before. But none of that has bothered Trump. He remains unfazed.
What amazes people around the world about American politics today is that Trump remains an obsession with Americans, in particular with his Republican supporters who continue to believe the 2020 election was stolen from him and who think he should be president again. He remains hugely popular among his base and none of his Republican rivals can match him in the opinion polls, despite the fact that they are, each of them, qualified to be much better candidates than he for the party's presidential nomination.
And now observe the Democrats. When Joe Biden was elected President in 2020, the expectation was that he would serve a single term --- his age precluded a second term --- and that for 2024 a younger person, preferably Vice President Kamala Harris, would carry the party standard against the Republicans. But Biden has made it clear he wants to be re-elected in 2024.
That has put paid to Harris' ambitions and those of other Democrats who harbour presidential aspirations at this point. The scene is quite intriguing. Two old men --- Trump is seventy-seven and Biden is eighty --- are both going for a rematch (unless the justice system sends Trump to prison before the election). They are both tired men who ought to have called it a day. They have not.
Again, if Trump is going through all his legal difficulties, President Biden has his own problems as he seeks a second term. His son Hunter Biden is under investigation for questionable business dealings, with the Justice Department under Attorney General Merrick Garland determined to ensure that the law is applied equally to Trump and the young Biden.
But besides the question of age related to Trump and Biden, there is that question of the extent to which the Hunter Biden case will affect Biden's campaign for a second term in the White House. If Trump beats Biden and then if the courts, notably the legal system in the state of Georgia, convict Trump, how will America cope with a situation the likes of which it has never been up against in its history?
Something bizarre has happened to the American psyche, in that political sense of the meaning. Indeed, it has been happening over the past many decades, beginning with the election of Ronald Reagan as President in 1980. In these last few decades, men who could have made a positive difference as occupants of the White House were simply unable to make it to presidential office. Michael Dukakis was a good candidate but lost to George H.W. Bush in 1988. In 2000, it was quite clear that Al Gore, Vice President under Bill Clinton, had won the election in a hard-fought campaign.
But then the Supreme Court stepped in, stopped the vote count in Florida (where Jeb Bush was Governor) and decided George W. Bush had won the presidency. Back in 1960, there was the suspicion that Richard Nixon had beaten John F. Kennedy, that Chicago Mayor Richard Daley had a hand in manipulating the results in favour of the latter. Nixon's team asked him to challenge the results. To his lasting credit, Nixon declined to take the advice. Eight years later, it was a revived Nixon --- politically astute, an expert in foreign policy --- who beat the Democrat Hubert Humphrey to become America's 37th President.
The paucity of qualified candidates for the presidency is today a reality in American politics. And that is quite a departure from the way things were in earlier times. Even as late as 2008, John McCain, a Vietnam veteran and decent man, was the torch bearer of the Republicans against Obama. Four years later it was Mitt Romney, today a Senator, who was the Republican choice against Obama.
Looking further back, even Barry Goldwater, a conservative Republican people thought should not have his finger on the nuclear button, was nevertheless a gentleman who lost badly to President Lyndon Johnson in 1964. There was Nelson Rockefeller, who spent years trying to be President but somehow failed to reach the end of the marathon. The highest he could go up to was serving as appointed Vice President under an appointed President Gerald Ford in 1974-1977.
There were other good, well-meaning Republicans in those days. Thomas Dewey, Governor of New York, came close to beating President Harry Truman in 1948. Dwight Eisenhower, the World War Two general of fame, won two terms in the White House, beating the cerebral Democrat Adlai Stevenson both times. In 1968, George Romney, Governor of Michigan, entered the race for the Republican presidential nomination but withdrew when he realised that America's generals had given him a misleading picture of the situation in Vietnam. He subsequently served in President Nixon's cabinet.
Harold Stassen and William Scranton failed to win Republican support for the presidency. Among Democrats, there has been a plenitude of presidential politicians --- Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy, Edmund Muskie, Edward Kennedy, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Gary Hart --- each of whom could have made a difference in American politics.
Given the legacy which has been associated with American presidential politics, the landscape today, as Americans prepare to vote next year, is barren. Biden has little wish to walk away into the sunset; and Trump, for all his wrongdoing and indiscretions, will not find peace until he regains the presidency.
How times have changed! In 1961, Dwight Eisenhower was the oldest man to have completed two terms in the White House. In 1980, much speculation went into the candidacy of Ronald Reagan, then seventy and till that point the oldest candidate in history for the White House. And today, two men, one in his late seventies and the other in his early eighties, plan on fighting it out again in 2024.
Gerontocracy overshadows American politics today.
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