Viewpoint: Biden shows love for America

Jerome Walker

Dear President Biden,

Congratulations on your eighty-first birthday and achievements fighting climate change, adding jobs by building infrastructure, and creating the world’s currently strongest economy. I appreciate your cutting prescription costs and supporting Ukraine.

In America youth often outweighs experience. The roughly half of Americans who are forty years old or younger apparently want to be led by someone from their parents’ but not grandparents’ generation. Given your accomplishments, what reason explains your low approval ratings? As a retired neurologist, I know I’m considerably less sharp than when I was in my 60’s. Maybe that’s one reason.

Your likely opponent, Donald Trump, although three years younger, is overweight, eats a terrible diet, never exercises, appears chronically angry, and now afraid of prison, so is a huge health risk between now and 2028.

If our slow-moving legal system can’t convict him on one of his 91 criminal indictments before next November, democracy will be in peril. Trump  threatens to make voting more difficult, appoint more Clarence Thomases to federal jobs, throw 40 million Americans off Obamacare, lock up or execute opponents, and cut taxes again for the wealthy.

For all these reasons a majority of Americans, even most Democrats, hope that you, like Nancy Pelosi or Lyndon Johnson, will gracefully step aside at your first term’s end, as promised in 2020. You would secure your place in history and become a sought after advisor and elder statesman.

I believe you love America and would regret it if a failure next November allowed autocracy to trump democracy.