Trump-Biden race will be ‘death valley’

Current front-runners lack three essential qualifications for president.

by Talmage Boston and Tom Leppert

In October 1854, at the Battle of Balaclava in the Crimean War, a 600-man British cavalry regiment called the Light Brigade made history. Riding unarmored horses with lances and spears as their only weapons, they rode into the valley between Fedyukhin Heights and Causeway Heights near the Black Sea, seeking to attack a larger battalion of heavily armed Russian troops who had 50 artillery pieces. When the fighting began, the Russians shelled the Brits from three sides, and the brigade was decimated. What happened to them caused French Marshal (and British ally) Pierre Bosquet to say of their ill-considered maneuver into the valley: “It is not war. It is madness.”

News of the regiment’s bitter end soon went viral, to use a modern term, in large part because when poet Alfred Lord Tennyson learned of it, he composed “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” The poem’s timeless message regarding the futile pursuit of victory with a strategy doomed from the start now has application to Democrats and Republicans (and thus to most Americans) since the parties are now preparing to ride the country into battle in the 2024 presidential election aboard their current front-runners, presenting voters with the same dismal ballot choice this year that we had in 2020, even though both men have precipitously declined in stature since the last election day. Sad but true.

If Joe Biden or Donald Trump wins in November, then for the next four years, we’ll be led either by someone who every day becomes more cognitively dysfunctional or someone who every day becomes more psychologically unhinged. Such a bleak scenario will likely produce the same type of disastrous result for our country as was suffered by the Light Brigade 170 years ago.

Here are some of Tennyson’s lines for us to ponder:

Forward, the Light Brigade!

Someone had blundered.

Theirs not to make reply.

Theirs not to reason why.

Theirs but to do and die.

Into the Valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

Cannon to the right of them.

Cannon to the left of them.

Cannon in front of them.

Volleyed and thundered.

Stormed at with shot and shell,

Boldly they rode and well,

Into the jaws of Death,

Into the mouth of hell

Rode the six hundred.

Alfred Lord Tennyson writing about death and hell, compared to today’s presidential politics? Isn’t that a bit dramatic? A 2024 Biden-Trump race as a Valley of Death for the American people? Really?

Yes, really, and here’s why: When polled, a substantial majority of voters have said repeatedly: “We don’t want a Biden-Trump rematch,” just like the Light Brigade didn’t enter the valley wanting to get killed in battle. Yet despite the voters’ clear message about their preference, today’s parties keep pushing ahead with their front-runners (Onward! Onward!) toward November, knowing nothing good can come from an election predestined to produce four more years of disastrous leadership regardless of which man wins.

Yes, it’s a bona fide Valley of Death scenario because by allowing Biden and Trump to become their nominees, the parties will be yielding to two men who have proven over the years that they place their overinflated egos and selfish agendas above the interest of our nation and its citizens. Thus, the two parties will be complicit in moving ahead with dangerous retreads instead of doing what needs to be done: provide America with new candidates whose sole agenda is to deal with the looming issues that we now need addressed: immigration reform, deficit reduction, a sound energy policy, and a foreign policy capable of bringing some measure of stability to a world now spinning out of control.

As a historian and a former political leader, we are both often asked our opinions of the most important traits for a presidential candidate to have, especially in these challenging times when Congress and the American people are a house divided; keeping the government open over budget impasses has become a bullet that each year gets harder to dodge; and prospects for the world’s having a brighter future keep getting dimmer.

Both of us believe that if a person votes for a presidential candidate who proceeds to win the election, then that voter bears some measure of responsibility for his chosen nominee’s performance in the Oval Office. We write this essay for The Dallas Morning News because neither of us is willing to take responsibility for four more years of either Biden or Trump in the White House.

As we look ahead to the 2025-29 term, three traits stand out as being indispensable to a successful president.

First, he or she needs to be mentally sharp, have immense stamina, and possess a serious work ethic. More than ever before, the job requires round-the-clock vigilance and nearly superhuman efficiency.

President Biden is 81. It doesn’t take long to watch him these days to see that he’s steadily losing horsepower, and his mind and body’s downward slide is not reversible. It’s why about two-thirds of today’s Democrats wish he would not seek a second term, according to a recent CNN poll. The party’s leaders have not seemed interested in persuading him to step down, nor have they put forth a candidate to give him a serious race for the nomination. Incumbents win elections, and in partisan reasoning, winning with a bad candidate is better than taking a risk on a candidate that voters might actually want.

Second, the leader of the free world needs to be guided by an integrity-based moral compass capable of invoking the “better angels” of our nature. Both front-runners score low in this trait.