Joe Biden fires the starting gun on the presidential race

THE AMERICAN presidential election of 2024 will feature Joe Biden against the Republican nominee. The polls suggest that person will be Donald Trump. Mr Biden announced his re-election bid on April 25th, the fourth anniversary of the start of his previous presidential campaign. Though in fact this will be the fourth time Mr Biden has run for president: his first attempt came before the fall of the Soviet Union or, for those who think in terms of Michael Jackson’s discography, between “Bad” and “Dangerous”. Were he to win and complete a second term, he would be 86 when he left office. America’s population is much younger than that of other Western democracies, its economy more vibrant. Its politics, however, are gerontocratic.Those two facts—Mr Biden’s familiarity and his age—help explain why 70% of Americans do not want him to run again, a number that includes 50% of Democrats. Were he an inspiring campaigner, the span between his first presidential bid and his first successful one might not have been 32 years. In 2020 Mr Biden’s candidacy was the answer to a problem the Democratic Party had created for itself. The front-runner in the primaries, Bernie Sanders, would have been a huge risk for the party to take, given his hard-left policies and the substantial risk that he would have lost to President Trump. Who among the field had the greatest chance of holding off Mr Sanders and then beating Mr Trump? It was the guy who had always been there, the man whose appeal was that, in a time of too much political excitement, he was a bit dull.