I have a question for New Zealand’s outgoing prime minister Jacinda Ardern: can you take President Biden with you?
Ardern announced this week that she would be resigning from her post, ten months before her term ends in October.
She acknowledged in her resignation address that her five and a half years have been filled with difficult challenges. Since Ardern’s election in 2017, New Zealand has dealt with terrorist attacks, natural disasters and of course the Covid-19 pandemic.
But Ardern stressed the fact that she is not leaving because of the difficulties of the job. Rather, she is departing because… well, to put it simply: she can’t cut it anymore.
“I am leaving because with such a privileged role comes responsibility — the responsibility to know when you are the right person to lead, and also, when you are not,” she explained.
It’s too bad Jacinda didn’t have this epiphany earlier.
I’m not sure the “right person to lead” the country would have locked down New Zealanders during Covid-19 and then refused to lift said lockdowns unless 90 percent of the country complied with the vaccine rules.
Would the “right person” for the job have openly admitted that their policies would turn New Zealand into a segregated society made up of the vaccinated and unvaccinated?
Ardern was never the best person for the job, but hey — at least she is finally figuring that out. Better late than never I suppose. Perhaps her recent slipping poll numbers helped shape her decision to bow out before another election.
“I know what this job takes, and I know that I no longer have enough in the tank to do it justice. It is that simple,” she said.
Ah, would that it were that simple Jacinda. Would that it were.
In America, our decrepit politicians have a knack for complicating even the simplest things.
While the forty-two-year-old New Zealand prime minister is assessing her fitness for office, our eighty-year-old leader in the United States is potentially gearing up to run again in 2024. And if anyone dares to challenge Joe’s tank, he defiantly challenges his critics to push-up contests.
If Joe Biden were concerned about the “right person” leading America, he would have bowed out of politics a long time ago. Instead, he is mulling over a second term.
If elected, Joe Biden will be eighty-two on Inauguration Day 2025. He will be eighty-two at the end of his presidency.
If his age weren’t enough evidence of Biden’s depleted tank, then how about the fact that he seems utterly uninterested in running the country?
Even with a myriad of disasters piling up on his desk — the classified documents fiasco, the southern border crisis, the looming recession — Biden rarely interacts with the press corps. In fact, he often laughs at journalists as they shout their questions while being pushed out of the Oval Office by his aggressive staffers.
He never misses the opportunity to get a head start on a long weekend and typically, his weekends are spent hiding out at his home in Delaware.
He seems most content when he is boarding a plane to St. Croix or attending a gala with A-list celebrities.
When a person stops showing up for the job, is it safe to assume that they are no longer the right person for it?
Biden has easily been as big of a failure as Jacinda Ardern. The only differences are that Jacinda doesn’t make a habit of falling up stairs or forgetting names.
The prime minister finished her resignation address by thanking Kiwis for giving her the opportunity to serve. She added that she hopes she will be leaving behind the belief to New Zealanders that they can be their own kind of leader: “One that knows when it’s time to go.”
If only her message could be delivered to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Then again, Wilmington Joe likely would not be home to accept the delivery.
