Chris Hayes: Joe Biden’s re-election campaign is a “tough task”

In this week’s episode of Inside the hive, The Chris Hayes noted that at the end of the day we are all just “meatbags,” an immutable fact of life that “hangs around so much of this” debate within the Democratic Party, whether Joe Biden, after a disastrous performance, the best option is Donald Trump. Biden has been “degraded,” Hayes noted, adding that Trump has “clearly slacked off.”

“The nature of age is that it’s not static,” Hayes noted. It’s “dynamic and changing from day to day.” Hayes, 45, said he felt that reality had been overlooked in some of the recent conversations about Biden.

In his view, Biden was a remarkable president with significant legislative accomplishments. “Biden’s domestic policy record during one term is arguably the best of my life,” he said. “So you can say he’s done a great job. You ask yourself, ‘Okay, but do I think this man should have the most stressful job in the world at 85? And that’s exactly what you’re asking voters to do.'”

He added: “That’s a difficult question.”

Hayes said the ongoing debate about older politicians must take into account that “the spectrum of ageing possibilities is very wide.”

“You can have a stroke at 61 and never recover,” he said, and “you can run marathons at 60, until you’re 75, and live to be 100. Nobody knows what’s going to happen. I feel like that perspective is missing from all of this.”

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

Hayes argued that media attention on Biden’s suitability for the military had been “exacerbated by decisions made by the Biden people,” particularly by restricting Biden’s interviews and press conferences.

Relations between the White House and the press were “mutually hostile, in some ways more than usual,” Hayes noted. “So you see a lot of pent-up anger among journalists who felt excluded.”

Of course, the critical debate with Biden after the debate – Hayes spoke of a “rebellion” within the Democratic Party – “will affect the poll numbers as much as the actual debate. Whether that is good or bad, I don’t know.”

But it is definitely different from the dynamics within the Republican Party.

“This is an incredible moment when you compare the aftermath of Trump’s conviction to the aftermath of the debate,” Hayes said. “The aftermath of the debate was maybe a hundred times as big an issue … and the reason it was a much bigger issue is because the center-right media didn’t bat an eyelid once at Trump’s recent conviction. They said, ‘It’s great that he was convicted. It’s great. We love it. Everyone should be convicted convicts.'”

“The entire Republican Party just rallied around it,” Hayes said. “So there was no real story. It was just, ‘What are you going to do?’ That wasn’t the case with Biden’s debate performance. And so – because the center-left media, which is broadly derived from the mainstream media – is much more belligerent, I think more realistic, there’s discourse and debate – you get this huge story. But I also think that ultimately, in the long run, that’s a good thing.”