Opinion | Will Biden have what it takes in 2024? Eight lefty columnists weigh in.

There is, of course, an elephant (or maybe a large, unignorable donkey?) in the room. “He is too old,” says Ruth Marcus, concisely. Perry Bacon describes himself as “not thrilled” by Biden’s quest for another term. Various fantasies of torch-passing, of a President Whitmer, say, are aired.

But the group, which also includes Dana Milbank, Jen Rubin, Paul Waldman, Gene Robinson, Greg Sargent and E.J. Dionne, observes that this octogenarian has “solidified and expanded NATO, snookered Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) in the debt ceiling negotiations and racked up as impressive a first-term domestic record as any incumbent in memory,” as Jen says. Biden’s approval ratings might be mixed, but he has accomplishments to point to. And he has shown he has what it takes to beat the almost equally elderly, and now multiply indicted, GOP front-runner, Donald Trump.

Although a number of the columnists express real uneasiness about Biden’s age and health — he would be 86 at the end of a second term, Paul points out — some, including Gene, have the added perspective of actually having talked to the president personally and at length. “I can attest that whatever else anybody thinks about him, he’s not senile,” Gene says.

So there you have it. Of course, it’s a long six-plus months until that first Democratic primary in South Carolina — and as we all know, a lot can happen in that time.

Chaser: Our right-leaning columnists recently conducted their own 2024 roundtable and confronted an entirely different stumper: Will Trump’s legal difficulties hinder him or just make his candidacy more urgent than ever?

“What’s behind the curtain of AI? The cost of the human labor it took to produce the training data. … Who produces that training data? People do. And those people deserve residuals,” argues writer and actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt in an op-ed this week.

Gordon-Levitt, who is on strike times two as a member of both the writers’ and actors’ labor guilds, ably explains the larger implications of one sticking point in the current showdown with studios. He says writers and actors signed contracts without dreaming their work product would be harvested to train generative artificial intelligence programs that could ultimately put them out of work forever. Now, those creators deserve a slice of whatever new AI creations result — and not just writers and actors but also “the camera operators, the costume designers, the sound mixers, everyone whose work the AI will be ingesting, mashing up and mimicking.”

If some rare diseases can be ameliorated if treated early, columnist Bina Venkataraman writes in her latest take on the technology of the future, why aren’t we consistently looking for them? “Hundreds of treatable genetic diseases go unnoticed for years,” she writes, “not because they cannot be diagnosed, but because newborn screening for them is not routine in the United States.”

Changing that is already technologically within reach. “If biomedical breakthroughs are to benefit the millions of children afflicted with rare diseases,” Bina writes, “genetic testing of babies needs to expand.” That genetic sequencing process, she argues, is useful even in cases where we don’t yet know good ways to intervene. “Failing to screen for [those diseases] is tragic, too, because it keeps patient groups from advocating for research into cures, taking part in clinical trials and demonstrating to biotech companies that there is a market for experimental therapies.”

Chaser: Earlier this year, science reporter Carolyn Johnson wrote for the news side about her family’s unbelievable journey to access vital drugs when her toddler was diagnosed with a rare disease.

Foreign policy expert Yevgeniya Gaber takes a break from sheltering from Russian bombs in her Odessa basement to argue that, in order to preserve Ukrainian shipping, the country’s allies need to remove Russia from control of the region’s maritime routes.

“Russia continues to export grain from the occupied territories,” Gaber writes. “It has changed the port of origin for stolen grain shipments, spoofed electronic tracking devices, faked paperwork to evade international sanctions and mixed stolen Ukrainian grain with its own.” Its aggression, she says, should not be rewarded with a lifting of sanctions as Russia is demanding, but by measures to reduce its leverage.

• For our Post Pandemic series, Blythe Roberson writes about how covid helped her leave hookup culture behind for real intimacy.
• George Will makes the case for rebuilding the U.S. defense industrial base.

It’s a goodbye. It’s a haiku. It’s … The Bye-Ku.

Have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, along with any questions/comments/compliments/concerns. We’ll see you tomorrow!