Biden is operating as a stand-in, a widget, or a MacGuffin, whose primary purpose is to make it to November 5 of this year without expiring.
In life, as in science, it can be useful to extrapolate, and here, in the summer of 2024, it comes time to do just that. It is by now near-universally acknowledged that Joe Biden is too old to perform his duties. It is less universally acknowledged that this has serious implications — the chief among which is that, for all the rococo pageantry that attends his reelection campaign, Joe Biden is not, in fact, running to be president of the United States.
