Speaking of things you don’t see every day, Ruth Marcus urges Joe Biden to run for president:
He should run as Biden Unbound. He can, pardon the phrase, trump concerns about age by announcing that he’ll seek just a single term — and picking a strong, preferably female, running mate. (Elizabeth Warren would be a tempting choice but probably not an optimal one. She’d be divisive in a general election and, at 66, reinforces the age issue.)
One-term Biden wouldn’t have to worry about satisfying constituencies or winning reelection. One-term Biden, this argument would go, would be free to craft the kind of bipartisan deals that only a Senate veteran can pull off — although, in my view, Biden’s chief deal-making claim to fame as vice president, the fiscal-cliff agreement, gave away too much to Republicans.
An alternative, or perhaps complementary, theory is that Biden could run to Clinton’s left, seeking to seize on the base energy evoked by Warren and, in her stead, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
IMO Joe Biden brings even less to a presidential candidacy than Hillary Clinton if such a thing be possible. That the absence of prospective candidates under the age of 65 doesn’t impel the Democrats to question their more general political strategy is astounding. Basically, the party has lost a whole generation of elected office holders.
I agree with your analysis completely. For a party that purports to appeal to the young, it’s surprising there are so few prominent Gen-X politicians. It’s also surprising that the Boomer generation produced so few competent politicians outside the Bush and Clinton clans.