Some of us haven’t yet finished wishing Barack Obama would just go away. A decade after leaving the Oval Office, the former president still hovers over our politics issuing sanctimonious tweets in support of dishonest causes, such as the Democrats’ botched gerrymander in Virginia.

But now, even with one ex-president still loitering with intent, there is another whose absence we constantly crave but are repeatedly denied. In this desire, we are certainly joined by most Democrats, for the ex-president in question is Joe Biden, whose already scant capacities dwindled into non-existence in 2024, a diminishment that led ineluctably to the blue party’s crushing electoral defeat at the hands of Donald Trump.