We need something to BothSides the election and this is something

Whenever a journalist/pundit is challenged on the vastly disproportionate attention given to Joe Biden’s age, the response is generally to respond to the strawman argument that Biden’s age isn’t an issue at all. Of course, Biden’s age is a legitimate source of concern, and is a demonstrable level of concern for voters. The issue isn’t that the issue is being covered at all, it’s 1)the ratio of coverage of Biden’s age and gaffes to Trump’s similar age and much worse gaffes, and 2)the ratio of coverage of Biden’s age to the actual substantive stakes of the election:

Still, yes: Biden is old. He’s always had gaffes, he’s always worked to hide his stutter, and now he’s having overt senior moments. He looks and sounds like an old man, and polls show that his age is voters’ biggest concern about him.

But what’s most striking about this discussion is how lopsided it is. It raises concerns about Biden but does not weigh them against concerns about Trump. Elections, after all, are about weighing tradeoffs.

Trump, it turns out, is also old. He’s 77 now, and if elected in November, he would be the oldest president ever by the end of the term. He is louder and higher energy than Biden, which some interpret as comparatively youthful, he’s always said nonsensical things, and now he’s having overt senior moments.

It’s possible to go through the two men’s lapses tit for tat. Biden, defending himself last week against the accusations of befuddlement, compounded the bad press by mentioning Mexico when he was talking about Egypt. A few days earlier, he referred to the leader of France, Emmanuel Macron, as “Mitterand,” the name of the former French president who died in 1996.

But last October, Trump referred to Hungarian President Viktor Orbán as “the leader of Turkey.” He has said he’s running against “Obama” multiple times. Last month, Trump confused Nikki Haley with former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, lying that Haley was responsible for the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol, an even more ridiculous lie than his lie blaming Pelosi for it.

Biden and Trump are both old, they’ve both clearly lost a step. In this election, age and mental acuity are, at worst, a wash—at least as things stand now.

But the two men differ on so much else—character, respect for rule of law, posture toward NATO—that fixating on their one shared weakness, and even then only focusing on one of them, is odd. Biden, for all his faults, is running to preserve constitutional democracy and America’s role as the linchpin of global stability. Trump is running to put himself above the law, breaking the republic in the process.

The problem here is the lack of context and the lack of perspective. Here’s Grossman’s convenient graphic illustrating the false equivalence:

I personally don’t think “Joe Biden is old” should be receiving more attention than the rest of these things combined, which is one reason I’ll never be an editor for a major news site.