| Dems in disarray? That's the cliché. But in the left-leaning columnist roundtable that politics editor Chris Suellentrop convened this week, you'll find a group quite neatly arrayed around the conclusion that 80-year-old President Biden, while bringing some risks, is probably both inevitable and actually fairly promising as the 2024 Democratic nominee. 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? AI goes to Hollywood "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." |
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