During President Joe Biden’s first press conference Nancy Cordes of CBS News asked him: “Have you decided whether you are going to run for reelection in 2024?” “The answer is yes,”, he responded. “My plan is to run for reelection. That’s my expectation.”

You don’t have to be an insurance agent with actuarial tables at the ready to be cognizant that the odds aren’t very promising that a 78-year-old frail looking man in the most stressful job in the world will survive a four-year term.

The expectation of political analysts, insurance agents and bloggers is that there’s no way in hell Biden will run for reelection in 2024, if he’s still alive.

When you’re a septuagenarian on the cusp of becoming an octogenarian, it takes a lot of optimism to fill out a monthly planner, let alone make career plans for four years into the future. For Biden taking things one day at a time isn’t a platitude, it’s his strategy for surviving his golden years.

Biden could have deflected the question by saying: I’m too busy trying to rescue the economy and defeating the coronavirus pandemic to worry about my future plans. Ask me again in a couple of years.

Or he could have told the truth and admitted that at 78-years-old he’s already exceeded his expiration date, and that in 2024 he won’t have the energy to get up in the morning, let alone assume the burden of the presidency. But if he declared that he wasn’t running for reelection he would immediately become a lame duck, and all attention would shift to vice president Kamala Harris.

So, Biden told a transparent lie, to no pushback from the assembled reporters. Of course, we couldn’t expect the press to tell the president: Joe, you aren’t fooling anybody, we all have you as our top pick in our death pool.

But I’m not worried about Biden’s tenuous hold on life, a frail good-hearted competent politician is exponentially better than a raging out-of-control fascist racist. Not to mention, that standing in the wings, is Kamala Harris, the future of the Democratic Party.