Jonathan Alter is an author who has written biographies of a series of Democratic presidents including Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama and FDR. He’s also a commentator who pops up on MSNBC and occasionally on programs like The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Today, Alter has an opinion piece at the NY Times titled “Oh, Biden, What Have You Done?” As you can probably guess, it’s about the classified document scandal.

Remember the iconic image of a smiling Joe Biden in his 1967 Corvette Stingray? It conjured charming Uncle Joe, a retro-cool guy who’d been around the track and knew how to handle it.

Four months after President Biden called Donald Trump’s mishandling of classified documents “irresponsible,” that vintage car — parked at the president’s home in Delaware next to his own boxes containing classified material — has been transformed into a shiny symbol of hypocrisy. If you went into a G.O.P. whataboutism lab and asked for a perfect gaffe, you’d come out with the president snapping last week to a Fox News reporter, “My Corvette is in a locked garage.”

Well, the storage room at Mar-a-Lago is locked, too.

Alter doesn’t think Biden’s mistakes are really as bad as Trump’s when compared closely but he also is savvy enough to realize those differences may not matter much to Americans who don’t look quite as closely. As the old saying goes, if you’re explaining you’re losing. Biden and his team will have to do a lot of explaining to set his sloppy handling of documents apart from Trump’s. And while I’m sure the major media is up for the effort, the reality is there’s only so much bandwidth available during a campaign. If you’re talking about classified documents you’re not talking about other things that might help your campaign more.

And that’s where Alter sort of turns a corner. If this whole document thing is going to spoil his image, maybe it’s time for him to leave the stage.

…the president isn’t looking good in polls pitting him against Republicans in hypothetical 2024 matchups. Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump have been running about even, a depressing finding for Democrats. And if the G.O.P. nominates a younger candidate like Ron DeSantis, Mr. Biden could be the octogenarian underdog in the general election.

Imagine instead that the president takes a leaf from Nancy Pelosi and decides not to run. Mr. Comer and the clownish members of his committee would probably end up training most of their fire on Democrats not named Biden. Democrats would “turn the page,” as Mr. Obama recommended in 2008, to a crop of fresher candidates, probably governors, who contrast better with Mr. Trump and would have good odds of beating a younger Republican. And the smiling old gentleman in the Corvette — his shortcomings forgotten and his family protected — would assume his proper place as a bridge between political generations and arguably the most accomplished one-term president in American history.

So many things get left out of this summary that are at least as interesting as the things he includes. For instance, the name Kamala Harris never appears as a factor in any of this, not as a helper for Biden on the 2024 campaign trail and not as an heir apparent. In fact, Alter seems to be skipping right over her for “fresher candidates, probably governors.”

It’s also interesting that Alter seems to think Biden can restore his image by leaving. Why would that be, exactly? If he’s going to be cleared on the document front then there won’t be a problem facing Trump because of that. And if he’s not going to be cleared that how will stepping back (partly because he’s found culpable) help restore his image?

I guess what I’m suggesting is that Alter seems to be using the document mess as an excuse to yank Biden off the stage. It’s not the real reason he needs to go it’s just a convenient premise. The real reasons are the ones reflected in those polls Alter refers to, polls taken before the document situation was even on the radar. People think Biden is too old and not that competent. They started thinking that during the withdrawal from Afghanistan and between the border crisis and inflation they’ve never really stopped.

Most of the top comments on this article are of the “but Republicans!” variety so I think it’s fair to say there’s lots of resistance to this idea. But there was one comment in the top 10 that caught my attention.

Preface: I didn’t vote for Trump, but I wasn’t thrilled about voting for Biden. I hope these events will sway him not to run again. My hope is that the Democrats will start focusing on who will run in 2024. Someone younger, with fresh ideas who realizes that the GOP will use every possible tool to win. It can’t be Biden and it really can’t be Harris.

It has nearly 600 upvotes but it’s really alone in a sea of people pledging to vote for Biden. My takeaway is that some of the party elite would like to see Joe move on and become a bridge between generations but that idea doesn’t seem to really be catching on with base voters, at least not yet. I wonder if that’s because they love Joe so much or because there’s really no one appealing at the other end of that bridge.