To the editor:

I count myself among those who believe President Biden should allow — or more appropriately, force — the Democratic Party to make the transition to a new generation of leadership for the November election.

But that opinion didn’t just occur to me after our octogenarian commander in chief had a bad night trying to debate a slightly younger blatant liar on national TV. It has been long in coming.

I was a child during the protests of the ’60s, cast my first presidential vote for Nixon (oops), and grew up skeptical of politicians. My first awareness of Senator Biden was his dismissive treatment of Anita Hill and her allegations against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. See where that got us?

Subsequent years showed Biden to be a capable politician, able to switch from folksy to tearfully sincere on demand, and a good second-fiddle to President Obama. No wonder Biden and party leaders just assumed it was his turn in 2020.

But the world is more complicated now. Many seem willing to accept nationalist dictatorships in exchange for a few extra dollars (or euros, or rubles, etc.) in our pockets and a few extra gallons of fossil fuel to burn (sorry about that, future generations) in our gas guzzlers.

President Biden — and his team, frankly, don’t seem to be handling the complexity well. The vibe from the administration existed long before the debate performance.

The partisan media, pseudo-populists and do-nothing Congress (looking now at you, Rep. Stefanik) whip up false crises, cast blame on stereotyped villains, and deepen divisions when we would do better accepting our differences and solving our challenges together. So the current administration struggles to push against those riptides, getting far less done than I’m sure they hoped.

No surprise that a lying, felonious candidate from the P. T. Barnum school of politics (“a sucker born every minute”) fast-talked voters primed and angered by FoxNews et al., into believing his gibberish sounds like wisdom.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration’s headway on the economy (that profit-centered political philosophy again), and tiny steps on the environment, are mostly eclipsed by global political divisiveness, lies, war crimes, corruption. And the administration falls back on the old American solution of throwing around weapons and cash while populations suffer and die from Ukraine to Gaza to the West Bank to Sudan to Haiti and beyond.

We get enough re-hashed plots on TV and in movies, we don’t need it in the election booth.

A fresh slate — at least on one side — will provide a new and clearer contrast than seeing the same ol’ same ol’ at the top of the tickets in November.

But if the “powers that be” decide to play the game as it now stands, I won’t throw my vote away, and I’ll do what I must (biting my lip, fighting the urge to scream in exasperation) and hope the majority in our country will resist this latest wave of greedy wanna-be dictators. We can be better than this.

Peter Wilson

Lake Clear