By Tom Robotham

November 5th will mark a special anniversary for me: Fifty years earlier on that date, I voted for the first time. I remember the moment vividly—and the sense of pride I felt as I closed the black curtain and flipped the lever next to the name Hugh Carey, Democratic candidate for Governor of New York. 

Since then, I’ve never missed an election—including 12 for president—and I’ve always had an acute awareness of how much was at stake. Now, though, their significance seems to pale in comparison to the one that will take place in less than four months. As President Biden has said repeatedly, our very democracy is at stake. But I’d go even further than that: Sometimes I feel that my very sanity is at stake, as if I’m having a nightmare from which I can’t awake, or a bad acid trip that won’t end. How can it be, after all, that Americans may elect a convicted felon, a rapist, a pathological liar, a virulent racist and misogynist, and a worshipper of dictators who unleashed a mob on the Capitol because his ego is so pathetically weak that he can’t acknowledge his 2020 loss to this day? Surely this can’t be real. 

Our one saving grace, over the last four years, has been the presence of Joe Biden at the helm. In many ways, he’s been a great president. For one thing, he’s accomplished more, legislatively, than any commander-in-chief since LBJ, if not FDR. More important, he’s restored a sense of morality to the office after Trump’s four years of obscene degradation. 

He’s done all this in spite of efforts by the MAGA cult (formerly known as the Republican Party) to destroy him. On top of that, he’s been dissed by many moderates who long ago bought into the right-wing talking point that he’s senile and “can’t put two sentences together.” 

The latter charge had always been at odds with my own observations. Sure, he’d garbled his speech at times, but I’d never seen anything that reminded me, even remotely, of my own mother’s decline into dementia.

With that in mind, I had high hopes when I tuned into the now-infamous debate on June 27. Not that I expected a stellar performance. But Trump has been sounding increasingly nutty lately, rambling about sharks and electrocution and so on, even as he’s stuck by his usual M.O. of being cruel and disgusting. How hard could it be to put him to shame?

Alas, the second Biden walked onto the stage, my heart sank. Before he even said a word, he looked like a patient who’d just wandered from his hospital room, not quite knowing where he was, and in need of a kindly nurse to shepherd him back to safety. 

Suffice it to say, it only got worse from there. After one rambling and disjointed answer, he said, “We beat Medicare.” To this day, I don’t even know what he was trying to say. At one point, it was so painful to watch that I had to turn it off. After a few minutes, though, I tuned back in, partly in hopes that Biden could shift gears and partly for the same reason that it’s hard to look away from a multi-car accident on the highway. As it turned out, it was a disaster from start to finish. 

Then came the post-debate comments, many of which shocked me almost as much as Biden’s utter incoherence during the event itself. 

“He had a cold!” wrote one person after I expressed my disappointment on Facebook. 

“It was just one bad night!” wrote another.

Still another asked whether I was saying I would abstain if Biden is the nominee. 

It was yet another instance—so common these last few years—in which I was reminded of the old fable “The Emperor’s New Clothes”: People telling me that I was somehow being disloyal by publicly announcing what I saw with my own eyes.

Piled on top of that were another series of comments insisting that this didn’t matter because people “vote on the issues, not for the person.”

That, of course, is patently absurd. People used to do that. Abraham Lincoln ran on the issues. But since the dawn of the Television Age, image has ruled the day. Thus, JFK won, not because of his platform but because he was young, handsome and charismatic and offered a vague message of a bright and shining post-War future. The same can be said of Obama. But this truth doesn’t apply only to the young and eloquent. Reagan won on image because of his wise, old-but-still-vigorous cowboy persona, and even the grossly inarticulate George W. Bush appealed to a lot of people with his good ol’ boy schtick. 

And it cuts both ways. Take Hillary Clinton, for example. Anyone who argues that she lost on the issues simply wasn’t paying attention. She lost because a lot of people hated her. Was there misogyny behind this? Of course—but that’s the point: She—the woman, not the platform—elicited a visceral negative reaction from many quarters.

Some people acknowledge these realities but wish people would vote on the issues. But I don’t share that view. I’m not saying issues are unimportant. Certainly, I’ve always voted for candidates who share my basic political philosophy. But the reality is, the presidency is about leadership—and that’s as much a matter of personality as it is about sound ideas. 

Trump gets this better than most, which is why he’s been able to create a massive cult of personality. The trouble is, he hasn’t a single shred of morality—and as FDR once said, moral leadership is the most important role of the president. That doesn’t mean they have to be saints. It just means that if they are to lift the nation up, they need to appeal to the best in human nature, not the slime in the gutters of our souls, as Trump does. 

Biden has performed that role admirably, as I said earlier. And until recently, I firmly believed that he could do so for another four years. 

Now I’m not so sure. We’ve seen, over the years, how dramatically the presidency accelerates aging, even in relatively young men. It seems like pure fantasy to believe that Biden—already a semi-feeble 81—could still be performing the duties of the leader of the free world in 2028. 

The great imperative, of course, is to beat Trump—to pummel him out of political existence. If Kamala Harris has to take over in a year or two, so be it. But therein lies the problem. After Biden’s disastrous debate performance, I don’t see how he can win.

By the time you read this, that may be a moot point. As I was finishing this column, the momentum of calls for Biden to step aside seemed to be building. At the same time, in his July 5 interview with George Stephanopoulos, Biden remained defiant. It was hard to tell what might transpire.

The one thing I know is that this is a sad state of affairs all around. Fifty years on, I just hope that this won’t be the last time my vote will even matter. As Biden would say, that’s not a joke.