Is there a least bad choice? (2024)

Going into Thursday night’s debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, I was wondering whether it might cause me to reevaluate my inclination of sitting this election out.

It did not.

The choice between Biden, the increasingly feeble and possibly crooked incumbent, and Trump, the wannabe authoritarian and certainly crooked challenger, has left me in a moral quandary.

Do I vote for the one who doesn’t make me hold my nose as tightly, or do I lodge a protest against the system that produced them as the top two choices by not voting for either?

Granted, some of this indecision will in the end be mostly inconsequential. No matter what I do, Mississippi is going to vote for Trump handily, as it has in the two previous presidential elections in which he has been the nominee. This state is too Republican and too conservative to think it might do otherwise.

Thus, my vote would have no bearing on the Electoral College count, which determines the winner. My vote, though, would be counted toward the national popular vote, which has no practical effect but does have symbolic importance. Trump’s constant lies, now almost four years in repetition, that the 2020 election was stolen from him has garnered less traction with the American people than it might have otherwise if he had won the popular vote, instead of losing it by 7 million votes.

To skip this year’s presidential election would break my lifelong string. Since 1976, the first year in which I became eligible to vote, I have voted in every presidential election. It would feel like an abandonment of my civic duty to do otherwise this year.

Yet, I have been unable to get past what troubles me deeply about both Biden and Trump, and there is not a third-party candidate out there who is a viable alternative.

Biden should have called it quits after one term. His debate performance only reinforced my conviction about that. The 81-year-old incumbent frequently seemed lost, his voice weak, his arguments confused. And that’s after several days of debate preparation.

His body and mind have not defied the aging process that slows down all but a small portion of people by the time they hit 80, if it hasn’t already killed them. The president gets some of the best care in the world, but it’s reasonable to worry not only whether he would live out a full second term but whether his declining cognitive abilities will accelerate. Do we really want a propped-up geriatric leading the most powerful nation on the planet?

Also, although Biden did a poor job of answering the question he was asked in the debate about abortion, his campaign has adopted a full-throated embrace of the abortion rights movement. Since the Dobbs decision ended abortion on demand nationwide, Biden has shifted from a politician who was at least uncomfortable with abortion to one who now copies the language of those who try to portray it as an expression of female empowerment.

Maybe that’s easier to accept from people of some denominations or who are unchurched. For a practicing Catholic, though, to make such an unreserved defense of abortion rights is heretical. Biden has appeared to decide — or his handlers have decided for him — that political power is more important than his conscience.

As for Trump, if he has a conscience, he does a good job of hiding it.

He plays to the religious right, not because he himself is a religious person but because he has seen it as an effective route to the adulation and power that he craves.

He has been found guilty in a civil court of sexual abuse and guilty in a criminal court of trying to cover up hush money paid to a p*rn star.

He might have an even longer rap sheet if a couple of friendly judges didn’t drag their feet on the most serious criminal charges against him — conspiring to overturn the results of the election he lost to Biden, including inciting the riot at the Capitol, and knowingly absconding with classified documents, then trying to impede their recovery.

Trump has a stronger claim to time in prison than he does a second term in the White House.

In Thursday’s debate, unlike Biden, Trump wasn’t confused. He was intentional and deliberate in lying about so many things that it’s hard to believe most anything coming from his mouth. His campaign remains largely based on fear, exaggerating the problems with immigration, the economy or foreign policy. He scowls except when he’s patting himself on the back, and he’s nasty in his manner.

Conduct that would have been considered unpresidential in previous times — the name-calling, the belittling of opponents, the crass self-promotion — has now become part of the brand that Trump has stamped on Republican politics and would like to bring back to the White House.

Our country is strong enough to survive a second Trump term, but do we really want to go through so much chaos?

It’s common during a long presidential campaign to not be particularly enamored with either major candidate by the time November rolls around. Attack ads and media overkill have a tendency to sour all but a candidate’s stalwart supporters. But this is just late June, and I’m already disheartened by the choices.

So are a lot of other people. The majority of Americans have said they are dissatisfied with both Biden and Trump in nearly every public opinion poll that has asked the question so far this year.

That feeling is likely to only get more intense over the next four months.

- Contact Tim Kalich at 662-581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.

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