The Democrats are doing it again. If Ruth Bader Ginsburg had resigned from the Supreme Court during Barack Obama’s first term as president — when the Democrats controlled the U.S. Senate — then Roe v. Wade would still be law. Obama would have replaced Ginsberg with another liberal justice and there would still be, today, five votes at the court preserving Roe.

Instead, Donald Trump replaced Ginsberg with Amy Coney Barrett several years later, and the court overturned Roe by a 5-4 vote.

Joe Biden is committing the same mistake Ginsberg did: He’s staying on the job too long. The implications, however, are far more ominous.

What’s been obvious for some time now was painfully clear during his debate with Donald Trump: Biden needs to step aside. And by refusing to, he may cost the Democrats the presidency and all the vital powers that come with it. 

Biden is a good man, to be sure. He has served his country admirably over many decades, in the Senate, as vice president, and as president.

And he ousted Donald Trump from the presidency several years ago, eliminating the significant danger a Trump victory would have entailed. 

But he’s now bumbling and stumbling toward an entirely different legacy as the man who gave the presidency back to Trump for no good reason. 

Indeed, there are several big problems with Biden continuing to run for reelection. For starters, presidential candidates should be at the peak of their intellectual powers for the entire term they seek.

This prerequisite shouldn’t be controversial. And yet Biden doesn’t qualify. Put simply, it’s irresponsible— for both Biden and his advisers — to continue trying to run the country at this point. 

Second, campaigns are hard and there are still over four months to go. Being on the ground in key battleground states is vital. For all his flaws, Trump is more vigorous than Biden, by a wide margin.

As bad as the debate was for Biden, it could very well go downhill from here. 

Finally, independent voters will be key in November. Hardcore partisans might not be swayed by Biden’s debate performance. But independents surely will be. They will care, as they should, about the candidates’ vigor and ability to perform in one of the world’s most demanding jobs.

There’s nothing wrong with Biden being in his 80s. But there is something very wrong with clinging to positions of power for too long. He shouldn’t be president anymore — today —l et alone seeking the job for four more years. 

Ginsberg didn’t resign, and conservatives eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion. Joe Biden should be applauded for his service to his country. And he should not seek another term as president.

William Cooper is the author of “How America Works … And Why It Doesn’t.” He lives in Truckee, Calif.

The post Guest Editorial: Just say ‘I’ll go,’ Joe appeared first on Park Record.

When people look at political questions through a partisan lens, they apply their own personal gloss to the world.

They reflexively interpret events in favor of their own tribe and against the other side. This distorts empirical reality, which is completely independent from such subjective mental processing. 

The main problem with partisan thinking is that it’s inaccurate, wrong, mistaken — irrespective of what tribe it comes from. It leads to gross stupidities across the political continuum, like believing Barack Obama was born in Kenya or Donald Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin to hack into the Democratic National Committee’s email servers. 

A partisan lens is counterproductive if your goal is to accurately interpret the world. If your political tribe is empirically right about something, then the lens is superfluous. If your tribe is empirically wrong, then the lens is distortive. 

Comedian Stephen Colbert may be right about some things (and quite funny to boot), but he was very wrong when he famously said, “Reality has a well-known liberal bias.” It doesn’t.

The empirical world is not liberal or conservative. Sometimes the right answer happens to be liberal; sometimes it happens to be conservative; and sometimes it has no home on either side of the rigid ideological divide.

The world unfolds according to the immutable laws of nature and science, not the transient perceptions of politics. Leaves don’t rustle in the wind differently depending on which party controls the presidency. Waves don’t pound the shore harder when it’s an election year. Economic cycles don’t suddenly reverse if the minority gains a majority in the legislature. And political policies, events and scandals don’t conform to the knee-jerk narratives of distant observers. 

While politicians and political operatives have incentives to distort the truth, the citizen’s goal should be straightforward: Strive to make sense of the world accurately. The alternative is to be wrong. Why would that be better? 

The comforts of partisanship make conforming to one’s group satisfying and protective. But it’s far better to be accurate and independent than wrong and partisan.

Thinking that Obama was constitutionally ineligible to be president or that Trump and Putin were scheming in cyberspace was radically at odds with the available evidence. And those who didn’t buy into these delusions were far better off for their independence.

As Frederick Douglas said, “I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false and to incur my own abhorrence.”

Being an anti-partisan is the way to go. Indeed, partisan misjudgment is more than merely an interesting psychological topic or stimulating academic question. Imposing on the world an ideology ridden with mistaken conclusions never goes well — especially in a representative democracy where public opinion often dictates public policy. A government’s intellectual premises must be sound for it to work well. And partisanship in America has contributed to numerous significant public-policy errors and failures. 

Just look at the 2024 presidential campaign: A guy who tried to overthrow a presidential election is about to square off with a guy who has trouble completing a sentence longer than a few words. 

Is this really the best we can do in the competition to see who will have America’s top job? Of course not. But because of the power of partisanship each side thinks their guy really is the right man to be president. This reflects how American politics is getting even more partisan as social-media echo chambers continue to turbo-charge our two-party political system. It’s going to be a wild eight months till November. And then, either way, a tumultuous four years from there. 

William Cooper, based in Truckee, California, is the author of “How America Works … And Why It Doesn’t.”

The post Guest Editorial: How to be an anti-partisan appeared first on Park Record.