2020 watch: Pushups Won’t Save Biden

Joe Biden is still 12 points above his fellow presidential hopefuls in the polls, but that’s “less than half what it was not that long ago” and showing “signs of weakness,” observes the Washington Examiner’s Byron York. Biden’s lackluster performance in the first debate leaves voters worried about his ability to take on President Trump — and the candidate’s joking vow to challenge Trump to a push-up contest shows he knows “the public is concerned about his vigor.” But “no number of push-ups will fix” the fact that voters worry that his mind isn’t as sharp as it used to be. Biden would start his presidency at the age of 78; if he wants to win, he needs to convince voters “he has what it takes for four, and perhaps eight, more years.”

From the right: Chinese Americans’ New Conservatism

At National Review, Rong Xiaoqing highlights the “rising force of conservatism among new Chinese immigrants” in America who’ve been “aroused by nationwide issues such as the racially conscious admissions policy of Ivy Legue colleges and the legalization of marijuana.” Their emergence, she notes, “may herald a climate change in a community” that’s been considered “a solid base for Democrats for two decades.” Protests in New York, particularly over Mayor de Blasio’s call to scrap the Specialized High School Admissions Test, “are perhaps the epicenter of the new generation of Chinese activism.” After all, the issue that “mobilizes almost every single person in the Chinese community is education.”

Foreign desk: A ‘Golden Age’ for US-Brit Ties

The “usual suspects in the global media” may be “forecasting doom” for the alliance between Britain and the United States, but Lee Cohen at The Hill instead predicts “a realignment of cooperation like nothing that has been seen since the Reagan-Thatcher years.” If Boris Johnson winds up replacing Prime Minister Theresa May, it could “usher in a golden age” for the alliance, given his “positive personal relationship” with President Trump. Johnson “is not only pro-American, he was born here” and has praised the Trump economy. With Johnson “waiting in the wings,” Trump has proposed a “prized free trade agreement” in response to Brexit. In short, says Cohen, “The strongest, most important foreign policy relationship that exists” may be “about to get a whole lot stronger.”

Urban beat: Make New York Grow Again

New York City was a great “boomtown” for most of its history, its population swelling 20 percent in every decade but one from the nation’s first census through 1930, observes Aaron Renn at City Journal. Yet by the 70s, “decline and abandonment” set in AS “New York forgot how to grow.” The 1961 zoning code put a de facto “cap” on the ballooning population, ensuring that housing couldn’t keep pace with demand. Traffic became clogged, subways overcrowded. Yet if the city can’t grow, it’ll just become “a giant income-sorting machine, in which richer people and businesses price out poorer ones.” Renn calls for new thinking about housing, infrastructure and planning, a “rollback of regulations” and “significant investments in transit.” Most needed: “a change in mentality” — a “reinvigoration of the mindset that sees New York as a growth city.”

Budget beat: Cadillac-Tax Repeal Spells Fiscal Trouble

The House voted Wednesday to repeal ObamaCare’s “Cadillac Tax,” which aimed “to limit the tax-free treatment of employer-provided health insurance benefits” over a certain level, notes The Concord Coalition’s Joshua Gordon. Yet the move is estimated to cost “$193 billion over the next decade and substantially more beyond that,” and the House bill includes “no plan to pay” for that. The tax was supposed to raise federal cash not just “through its direct effects of taxing insurance plans” but also indirectly, by freeing funds for employers to raise wages subject to income tax. Yet the House’s action might now even “pave the way for a worse vote in the Senate.” As Sen. Chuck Grassley put it, an unpaid-for repeal would “make it easier for the Senate to pass other tax breaks without paying for them.”

— Compiled by Ashley Allen & Adam Brodsky