Chris Hayes: Joe Biden’s Reelection Pitch Is a “Tough Ask”

The two leading candidates for president are aging right in front of our eyes. And that’s causing some very candid conversations all across the media world in the wake of last week’s pivotal presidential debate.

During this week’s episode of Inside the Hive, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes noted that at the end of the day, we are all just “flesh sacks,” an immutable fact of life that “hovers around so much of this” debate within the Democratic Party over whether Joe Biden, following a disastrous performance, is the best option to take on Donald Trump. Biden is “degraded” Hayes remarked, while adding that Trump “has very clearly declined.”

“The nature of age is that it’s not static,” Hayes observed. It’s “dynamic and it changes from day to day.” Hayes, 45, said he feels like this reality has been overlooked in some of the recent talk about Biden.

In his view, Biden has been a remarkable president, with significant legislative achievements. “Biden’s one-term domestic policy record is arguably the best of my life,” he said. “So you can say he’s been doing a great job. It’s like, Right, but do I think that this man should have the world’s most stressful job when he’s 85 years old? And that’s what you’re asking voters to do.”

He added, “That’s a tough ask.”

Hayes said the ongoing debate about elderly politicians should take into account that “the spectrum of possibility for aging is so wide.”

“People can have a stroke at 61 and never recover,” he said, and “people can turn 60 and run marathons until they’re 75 and live to be 100. No one knows what’s gonna happen. I feel like that perspective has been missing from all this.”

“I know people who were elderly and one week they were going to a Broadway show and two weeks later I was going to their funeral,” he added. “Everyone keeps talking about age as static in a way that’s driving me insane, both the Biden people and the other people. That’s not the way it works. Literally.”

Hayes made the case that the media scrutiny about Biden’s fitness to serve has been “exacerbated by choices the Biden people have made,” specifically to limit Biden’s interviews and news conferences.

The relationship between the White House and the press corps has been “mutually hostile, in some ways more than average,” Hayes observed. So “part of what you’re seeing is a lot of rage pent up from journalists who have felt like they’ve been frozen out.”

Of course, the post-debate scrutiny of Biden—Hayes called it a “rebellion” within the Democratic Party—“is going to drive polling numbers as much as the original debate. Whether that’s good or bad, like, I don’t know.”

But it’s definitely different than the dynamic within the Republican Party.

“This is such an amazing moment when you compare the aftermath of Trump’s conviction to the aftermath of the debate,” Hayes said. “The aftermath of the debate has been maybe a hundred times as big a story… and the reason that it’s been a much bigger story is that the center-right media never batted an eye” at Trump’s recent conviction. “They were like, It’s awesome that he was convicted. It’s great. We love it. Everyone should be convicted convicts.”

“The entire Republican Party just unified,” Hayes said. “So there was no real story. It was just like, What are you going to do? That has not been the case with Biden’s debate performance. And so because of that—because the center-left media broadly construed from the sort of mainstream media over—is much more disputatious, I think more reality-based, there’s discourse and debate—you’re getting this huge story. But also I think that’s ultimately, in the long run, a good thing.”