Biden and Trump are serious handicaps to their parties | GARY COSBY JR.

President Joe Biden has officially thrown his hat in the ring and joined the run for president. That is a real problem for Democratic Party leadership who must now either abandon a sitting president, something they are unlikely to do, or they have to funnel their support to a man who is, to put it bluntly, far too old to be president.

That sounds harsh, but there are only 2.7 million men in the United States who are in the age range 80-84 and the demographics do not show how many of those are healthy and lucid. The simple fact of the matter, if Biden is reelected, he should have a really good vice president because his chance of death over the next five years is extremely high.

On the other side the coin, the Republican Party has an even worse situation with former President Donald Trump in the race. He is carrying so much baggage into this election cycle he needs a multi-engine freight train to haul it all. The man is the dictionary definition of a liability, yet he is on the campaign trail and leaving Republican leadership with a conundrum.

Trump still has a fairly high degree of popularity with Republican voters, especially those on the far right of the party, so the Republican leadership can hope and pray that Nikki Haley or someone as yet undeclared candidate will emerge as a front-runner, or they will have to funnel their support to a man who simply cannot win the presidency.

Our two political parties are badly handicapped by the men who are currently their leaders, or at least their leading candidates, and neither party has anywhere to turn unless the voting public decides to go away from Biden and Trump or unless one or both of them were to die.

Again, sounds harsh, but Trump is very nearly as old as Biden though he wears it better than the president who looks every day of his age. The presidency is a high-stress job, perhaps the highest-stress job in the nation, if not the world. Having either Trump or Biden in office at their ages is a bad idea for the county. It is time to skew younger, much younger.

I think any competent Republican other than Trump could win the election without too much trouble. Biden isn’t getting anyone excited, but he is still preferable to Trump. When the former president hit the campaign trail, even after all the revelations that came from the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News, he still held onto the fiction that the 2020 election was stolen. It is such a tired lie that even he should be able to say enough is enough.

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Were I a Democratic Party strategist, I would hope Trump wins the Republican nomination. The man has such a large target painted on him that any campaign strategy would defeat him. All the Democrats have to do is replay Jan. 6 scenes overlaid with Trump’s own words. That alone will be enough to scare reasonable Americans to the polls.

On the other side, Republican strategists must be salivating at the prospects of contrasting a vibrant, young candidate against Grandpa Joe. Biden has had plenty of bad things going on during his presidency including more border problems and that debacle of an exit from Afghanistan, not to mention that the Office and Management and Budget projections say his spending plans would add $16 trillion additional dollars to the debt over the next 10 years. However, no matter what Republicans throw at Biden, they won’t be able to say he attempted a coup like Trump.

I am depressed just writing about these two guys running for president. I wish that Biden had declared himself a one-term guy and allowed the Democrats to move on. I wish Trump had the good sense not to saddle the Republican Party with his excessive baggage. That poor GOP elephant is so overburdened with his nonsense it can barely stand, much less move forward. I wish with all that is in me that we had a clean slate to work with and that we could bring an entirely new generation in to lead this country.

Frankly, I would be more open to voting for a third-party candidate this year than I’ve ever been in my life. I’m pretty sick of both the Republicans and the Democrats, and it would do the country good to have some third party come along and shake things up a bit.

Who knows, maybe we will have a Nikki Haley vs Robert Kennedy Jr. election. That would at least be a more interesting and engaging contest than a Trump-Biden rematch. Maybe both parties have interesting candidates they have kept under wraps who will emerge and give us an election we won’t need a truckload of antacids to stomach.

The plain fact is that both parties are seriously handicapped by their leading candidates. As a result, America is handicapped because, unless something emerges to change things, we are faced with four more years of this unpalatable political mess.

Gary Cosby Jr. is the photo editor of The Tuscaloosa News. Readers can email him at gary.cosby@tuscaloosanews.com.

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Biden and Trump will be a handicap to their parties | GARY COSBY JR.