All the Way with LBJ Redux or: Joe Biden's age problem isn't his age, but the age of his voters.

I'll start this off by coming clean and saying that I'm 68-years-old and I'll be voting for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in less than eleven months (or for whichever Democrat is running against Donald Trump or another Republican next November), but if I were 18 years old, I might not be.

We look back at Lyndon Baines Johnson now and many of us see the lasting legacy of his presidency in the triumph of Great Society programs, when Medicare was passed and when the Voting Rights Act of 1965 finally codified many of the demands of the Civil Rights movement. In 1968, however, there was nothing on many young people's minds but his role as the face of the Vietnam War. I was a young teen and the voting age was still 21 at the time, but I would have voted for anyone other than the president presiding over that war. I've been thinking about this a lot lately as I walk through neighborhoods where the stickers on lampposts are about the killing that is currently happening in Gaza -- killing that is being fueled by U.S. weapons that are being tied to possible war crimes. There are a lot of young voters who aren't as concerned as older voters with Biden victories like the $1.2 trillion infrastructure package, the $1.9 trillion in Covid relief, the confirmation of a large and very diverse crop new Federal judges, or falling unemployment, or a falling rate of inflation, or even avoiding the recession that was being almost uniformly predicted for the last three years. I can say that, for me, none of those domestic issues would have mattered until I was married with a child in the depths of the Reagan/Bush era.

In today's New York Times, the headline "In Campus Protests Over Gaza, Echoes of Outcry Over Vietnam" appeared and it only confirms what I've been seeing and fearing about young voters. Gaza will be an overriding issue for some of them, and I don't blame them; if I were fifty years younger, I would be them. Will college protesters and others who are horrified by what they see from Gaza on television and social media shift their votes from Biden to Trump in large numbers? Of course not. But they might stay home or vote for Cornell West or RFK, Jr., or Jill Stein. And us old folks can't tell them they're throwing away their votes. Don't we remember that young people are smarter than their elders? I certainly couldn't have been told that I was throwing away my support when -- as a 16-year-old non-voting anti-war protester -- I was 100% behind Bejamin Spock of the People's Party over the too-moderate-for-me George McGovern.

In these days when pundits like to act as if the major party nominees have already been confirmed nine months before the party conventions, it's hard to remember how late in the process LBJ bowed out of the 1968 contest. 1968 was a year of shocks, from the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy [Sr.], through Russian tanks in Prague, general strikes in France, and violent cops on the streets of Chicago, but before all those events came a routine presidential address about the Vietnam War on March 31, 1968, in which Johnson talked in some detail about his plans for peace in Vietnam for forty minutes and then ended by saying, "With America's sons in the fields far away, with America's future under challenge right here at home, with our hopes and the world's hopes for peace in the balance every day, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office — the presidency of this country. Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president." This was on a Sunday night in prime time during a time when presidential addresses pre-empted all broadcast networks and when all we had were broadcast networks; tens of millions of Americans got this same surprise announcement at the same time from a president who had won in a record landslide in 1964.

So, it's not a sure thing that we are predestined to a Biden v. Trump rematch in 2024, but if we are, the oldest major-party candidate of all time* can't take the support of young voters for granted. 

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*Speaking of candidates' ages and in trying to put myself into the shoes of young anti-war activists, I do remember myself as a watcher of politics thinking that Lyndon Johnson was ancient; he was only 59 in the video above.