I’m seeing some honest confusion from people asking why, if Biden is not running for re-election, he still is able to finish out his term. I wanted to share something I didn’t know before I ran for office myself — campaigning and governing are really two different jobs, and campaigning is MUCH more physically exhausting than governing.
When I first ran for local office on the library board, I hadn’t been particularly active in local communities. I had small children at the time, and while I did a lot of service work, it was mostly in the genre writing community, working on national / international projects like starting Strange Horizons and the Speculative Literature Foundation. I was very well known in genre, and barely known at all in my own neighborhood.
I knew that if I wanted to get elected (Trump had just been elected, and I was feeling a lot of despair, and Obama said to pick up a clipboard and run…), I needed to be much more known in my local community.
People won’t vote for you if they’ve never heard of you. Yard signs aren’t very effective, as it turns out. What works is actually meeting people, shaking hands, listening to them. A state-level elected kindly gave me some of her time back then, and told me that research showed that 75% of people will vote for you, if you shake their hand and ask them for their vote.
People want to be heard. One woman talked with me for about twenty minutes when I was standing at a table outside a local bakery, and at the end of our conversation, she said she still didn’t agree with me (on whatever policy thing we’d been discussing), but she appreciated that I’d taken the time to discuss it with her, and that she was planning to vote for me.
If I wanted to do the job of governing, first I had to do the job of campaigning. So for three months leading up to the local election, I scheduled myself pretty much straight through every day — whenever I wasn’t teaching, I did door-knocking, stood at tables on the sidewalk, went to community events.
I tried to meet with lots of different demographic groups, and hear people’s concerns (which also, of course, would make me better at the governing part of the job if elected). In the course of that, I learned a lot about my local community and people’s needs. I was also able to explain some things about library policy to people (we’d just gone fine-free, and a lot of people didn’t understand why that was a good thing — it usually took about five minutes to explain and get them on board).
Campaigning was necessary, and important, but it was also exhausting. I would forget to eat, because I was running from event to event. (I never forget to eat!) I had to start carrying granola bars in my car so I wouldn’t get light-headed. Kevin took over the childcare almost entirely so that I could campaign effectively. I often had a morning event, an afternoon event, and an evening event — I’d fall into bed exhausted.
Think about your most tiring travel day (because campaigning nationally requires a lot of travel), and add on that you have to be performing whenever you’re not traveling — because shaking hands and paying attention and speaking passionately and coherently about important issues you believe in requires a lot of extrovert energy, and even for those of us who love doing it, it burns you out. Compare that to governing, which is mostly reading things and sitting in meetings or at a desk.
Biden is 81, and is going through what I think is his third bout of COVID. He must be so exhausted.
I have some serious policy differences with Biden. I don’t think he’s perfect. But overall, I think he’s been a pretty excellent president for America, and I trust that he will be able to serve out his term at the level required — and that if he can’t, if somehow COVID hits him again, or something else really impacts his health and abilities, he’ll turn it over to Kamala at that point. I trust him to make that decision if the time comes.
(By the way, the three months of campaigning worked — not only was I elected to library board, and later school board, I ended up with one of the highest vote counts in my local election. Locals had learned my name, and apparently, trusted me to try to do a good job for them. Hopefully, they’re happy with that choice. Ten more months!)
