One of the reasons why the
delegates at the U.S. Constitutional Convention devised the Electoral College
to elect the federal president was that they thought that even at 7 million,
the population of the U.S. back then was too large for the even just the
propertied people, who could vote, to know the candidates very well, if at all.
At over 300 million, the U.S. population during the presidential reelection campaign
of Joe Biden had to rely on the mass media and the political elite, including
statements by the White House, for information on whether the sitting president
was too old to serve viably in a second term. The limited number of presidential
electors in the states would presumably be small enough that they could have
the opportunity to size up the candidates in person. But with electors from fifty
rather than just thirteen states, such an opportunity would not be likely. So
given the exponential growth of the United States both in terms of member
states and their respective populations, the originally anticipated benefit of
the Electoral College would not still hold even if the two major political
parties had not taken over the College. Even if the states’ respective electors
were able to spend enough time in person with the candidates, the parties had
ensured that those electors could not be autonomous and thus exercise their
judgment. Instead, judgment could only be made at a distance by the massive American
electorate whose perspectives have been very vulnerable to intentional manipulation
through and even by the media. Put another way, the American people have been
vulnerable to making a bad choice based on faulty information. This makes
American representative democracy itself vulnerable.
Under most circumstances, a
president’s staff can manage how the president comes off to the public. The presentation
can thus differ from how the president really is. Yet in casting a vote, a
voter should be able to size up how the candidates really are. This is crucial
when one of the candidates is already 81 years old. The Biden-Trump debate in
June, 2024 was a rare opportunity to see both men beyond the reach of their
respective handlers, and thus to get a glimpse of both men as they really were
at the time. Whereas Don Trump came off as focused, the president was
disoriented at times and generally appeared to suffer simply from old age. There
is no fault in that; the fact that the rare glimpse came as a surprise to many Americans
demonstrates the extent to which any president is managed on nearly all
occasions for public consumption and thus how wrong the voters’ view of an incumbent
can be. This insight, more than whether Joe Biden was too old to serve a second
term whose beginning was still six months away, was universally missed by the
media.
As if to confirm the realization of how much a president’s appearance is managed, and thus misleadingly positive as to a president’s person, the “Biden campaign said the president had a cold to explain why he sounded so hoarse and weak. But Biden’s stumbles right from the beginning [of the debate] played into his biggest vulnerability—his age.”[1] That a cold would not account for a person being disoriented and that Biden had no nasal congestion or even sneezing apparently did not occur to the president’s handlers. Their next explanation was that the president was suffering from jetlag from having flown internationally, but that he had not done so in 12 days also apparently did not occur to the campaign. As neither of these episodic explanations worked to diminish the rather obvious fact that old age is a condition rather than being merely showing in an isolated episode or event, the president himself tried again by telling a group of Democratic governors that he had not been getting enough sleep. If only getting more sleep could extinguish the general effects of old age, nursing homes would be empty.
Not unexpectedly, “Biden’s comment left several of the governors in the room frustrated.”[2] Yet after the meeting, three governors “painted a positive picture of the meeting during a news conference [outside the White House], adding that Biden is ‘all in’ and ‘in it to win it.’”[3] That the White House had governors speak publicly after the meeting to reassure the electorate of the president’s viability without mentioning that some of the governors had just been frustrated by the claim that an episodic lack of sleep could somehow account for the general condition of old-age demonstrates just how deceivingly the electorate is manipulated and thus how erroneous its view of the president can be without the people realizing it. How could they? The implications for impaired electoral judgment based on (deliberately) faulty information are clear. Without realizing it, the electorates of the States could vote for a second term not unlike that of President Wilson's.
Even in portraying the president’s old-age as if it could possibly be a “one-off” episode, Biden's handlers were taking advantage of the fact that they could manage how the president comes off in almost all of his public appearances. Sitting down for an interview on the radio and television, and reading a speech from a teleprompter at a campaign rally are just a few examples of how the handlers can make the president’s debate “performance” appear to be a “one off” bad performance relative to the others. It is precisely because of the deceiving effect of the handlers that "Democratic Rep. Brad Sherman . . . told CNN that the president needed to do a prolongued and live television interview unlike the recorded one on ABC."[4] The implication is that the public had not seen Biden without guide-rails on ABC and thus could not judge from that appearance how he might do on his own behind the scenes in thinking through and using judgment in an international incident. That Biden's handlers had given a radio host a list of questions to ask the president during a radio interview and that the same questions were asked in other interviews, also after the debate, also attests to the widespread impact of the handlers[5]. I contend that voters should have been informed of this "stagecraft" so they could realize the extent to which their perceptions of the president were being manipulated and thus could lead to bad or impaired judgment in voting.
A performance, such as is staged for a television interview or a campaign rally, is not at all like an ongoing condition such as old-age, which goes on. Even though the condition of old-age is more apparent on some days than others, the underlying condition itself is ongoing, and in fact gradually gets worse even if the people closest to the person don’t notice the change and think he is ok.
To intentionally portray such a condition as merely a bad performance (rather than a condition) by engineering good performances is intellectually and ethically dishonest. Leaving the electorate with a false impression, taking advantage of the distance between the people at the president, is precisely why the founders wanted the Electoral College. In other words, it is bad for American representative democracy that manufactured images of a president can have, and indeed have had an inordinate influence on voters' judgments. Shock from observing President Biden unfettered, and thus himself, during the debate reflects back on just how good a president's handlers are in crafting a "brand" for public consumption. That it is rare that the American people get to see the proverbial "man behind the curtain" (an allusion to the movie, The Wizard of Oz) can be inferred from just how shocked viewers were in glimpsing President Biden reacting in real time.
Not satisfied with leaving viewers with their valid conclusions from what they had seen of the the president during the debate, self-interested presidential handlers with an agenda—winning the election—tried to supersede the common-sense conclusions as if they were invalid or incorrect. The president had a cold. He had jetlag. He had not been sleeping well. Anything but the truth. Even if the cause of the condition of old-age were a lack of sleep, smart voters would ask themselves what might happen were President Biden called to the Situation Room in the White House even as early as 10pm (and what about at 3am?) in 2027 to handle an emergency abroad involving the U.S. military.
Ignoring that serious implication from their own narrative, the handlers scrambled nonetheless to get the president to a podium and teleprompter, and then, days later, to a television interview, as if the condition that the public had just seen during the debate were merely episodic too (and thus outweighable by the other appearances), the president’s handlers even got surrogates, including sitting governors, to publicly attest to the official narrative, which was that the president was fine and was "all in." Faced with this full frontal "corrective," how could the electorate's judgment on election day possibly reflect their authentic observations during the debate? Good judgment based on accurate empirical data is requisite to a voter being able to make a good decision on who should be president of the United States.
The American people were left with oblique references on television by Jake Tapper of CNN and Carl Bernstein, one of the famous Nixon-Watergate reporters, of admissions heard behind closed doors by people who had witnessed Biden in person enough to know that the president had actually been disoriented on as many as 20 occurrences, especially during the preceding six months. Bernstein said on CNN, "The people I've talked to have all been to Ron Klain [Biden's chirf of staff] in the last year to say, 'We have a problem.'"[6]. That such stuff doesn't usually get out (and isn't meant to get out) and thus reach the American electorate is a large part of why the delegates at the Convention anticipated the need for an institutional check, the Electoral College, on the electorate itself should it make a bad decision. The need for such a check was live and well in 2024, and the Electoral College had never worked as intended, so there was a problem even though it was below the radar of public discourse in the media.
The Founders’ astute insight that not even 7 million citizens could know the candidates for the federal presidency well enough to exercise effective judgment in assessing them at the ballot box was behind the invention of the Electoral College. Even if it had ever worked as a check on bad judgment that can occur at a distance, the College could not be relied upon as such a check by 2024.
Historically, the main officeholders at the federal level of a federation, including the Holy Roman Empire, were chosen by officials at the state level rather than by the individuals in the states. In having state governors in the European Council nominate a candidate for President of the European Commission, the E.U.’s executive branch, the E.U. is in sync with the historical federal thought. Although the electors of the Electoral College in the U.S. meet by state, such that each state votes for president, state officials did not, at least as of 2024, have a role in selecting the federal president.
That representatives elected by E.U. citizens in the European Parliament vote (as a parliament) on the nominee also deviates from the historical thought, which has state-level officeholders select federal officeholders. In American terms, the European Council nominating a candidate and the European Parliament voting on that candidate is roughly as if the U.S. Senate nominated a candidate for president and the U.S. House of Representatives voted on that candidate. Both unions instantiate modern federalism, which is a hybrid as governmental sovereignty is split between the state and federal institutions/governments, so the U.S. would not have to look very far for compatible ideas on how to modify the way its federal president is selected. This is not to say that the U.S. Senate should nominate candidates for president and the U.S. House should vote (not by state) to elect a nominee; rather, some role for governors and/or the Congress might serve as a viable check on the electorate, given the extent to which handlers manipulate the electorate and can thus cause it to make a bad decision on election day.
Given the falsity in how handlers manage the presentation of a president, including President Biden, it should not be surprising that the American people make some bad decisions as an electorate. How many Americans in 2016 anticipated how President Trump would react to losing the election in 2020? The public image of the man in 2016 differed strikingly from the man himself, yet how many Americans knew even that such a difference existed (and exists for any occupant of the White House).
To be consistent with historical federal thought, state legislatures and governors, rather than the Congress, would either elect the federal president or at least act as a check on the American people as an the electorate. It has been said especially in American anti-federalist historical thought that state officeholders are "closer to the people" because there are fewer people in the state-level districts than in the Congressional constituencies. But some states are quite populated themselves. Some big states, such as Illinois, California, Florida, and New York, could have a level of even smaller legislative districts by being federal themselves, hence with their respective sovereignties split between the state-level government and those of states within a given state. Such federated states would be like the E.U. states of Belgium and Germany. Chicagoland in Illinois could be like Bavaria in Germany. Having grown up in northern Illinois well outside of Chicagoland, I can attest that the Chicago metro is like another country even within Illinois (although I am a native Cubs baseball fan), even if Europeans like to assume that U.S. states are like provinces.
Such a system of American federalism within federalism would resemble the federalism theory that Althusius describes, based on the Holy Roman Empire, in his Political Digest (1603). In that theory, the officials of the immediately lower "rung" select the officeholders of the next higher level. Given the E.U.’s process for selecting its executive-branch president, the U.S. could realistically incorporate at least one element of historical federal thought: namely, that the selection of at least one federal official could involve state-level legislators and/or heads-of-state. Because modern federalism, which both the E.U. and U.S. instantiate, is a hybrid only partially incorporating from the historical federal thought, a role for the Congress (like that of the European Council and the European Parliament in the E.U.) is an alternative candidate for a check.
I submit that some hybrid of either state-level or federal-level office-holders could add a badly needed check-and-balance to the U.S. federal system of governance. In this respect, the E.U. is structured better than is the U.S., as per how a federal president is selected.
In conclusion, the issue of President Biden’s age in 2024 gave the American people an opportunity to see a basic vulnerability in how the federal presidency is filled, and looking to the E.U. affords the Americans a glimpse of a possible solution. How many American voters in 1968 and then again in 1972 had spoken with Richard Nixon in person without his handlers present and could thus realize how morally and criminally compromised the man really was? Sadly, even incumbents are marketed as if they were brands, and votes “buy” one on election day. So much more was at stake in 2024 than President Biden’s age, though insight on how that was being deceivingly managed by the president’s handlers could give Americans a sense of how vulnerable they really were even to their own judgments, given the misinformation. That the excuses of a cold, jetlag, and a lack of sleep—all under the incorrect premise that old-age is episodic rather than being a condition—are so pathetic and that being interviewed by a journalist, reading from a teleprompter at a (caffeinated?) rally, and meeting with governors could possibly be effective counterarguments should have given even Biden supporters pause concerning how an occupant of the federal presidency was being determined by 2024. The failure of the Electoral College could thus be understood as leaving the U.S. vulnerable.
1 Domenico Montanaro, “4 Takeaways from the First Presidential Debate,” NPR.org, June 28, 2024 (accessed July 4, 2024).
2 Edward Dovere, “Biden Tells Democratic Governors He Needs More Sleep and Plans to Stop Scheduling Events after 8 p.m.” CNN.com, July 4, 2024.
3. Ibid.
