Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, I’m Peter Hamby.

In tonight’s issue, a close look at that R.F.K. Jr. Super Bowl ad—was it brilliant, or a spectacular waste of money? Plus, I check in with despondent Democrats who worry that Joe Biden’s age problem is only going to get worse.

But first, the latest from Abby Livingston on the Hill…

• The Gallagher mystery: Mike Gallagher retired over the weekend, a move that was met with a “sense of befuddlement” within the Republican political class, according to a House G.O.P. operative. The Wisconsin Republican, who isn’t yet 40, potentially had a long congressional career ahead of him and was a favorite within the millennial G.O.P. set that grew up in the pre-Trump establishment. That said, I wondered in recent days if this was coming: Gallagher was not merely the decisive vote in last week’s failed impeachment vote—he was also notably defiant in the face of right-wing backlash. Strong spines typically manifest when a Republican has made peace with his or her political fate, decided to not seek reelection, and plans to go out in a Butch Cassidy-style blaze of glory (e.g., Jeff Flake, Adam Kinzinger, etcetera.)

  Gallagher’s most recent F.E.C. report didn’t provide any clues. The congressman had more than $4 million cash on hand, no serious opponents in the primary, and continued raising money well into December—including a $3,300 contribution from Lloyd Blankfein on the last day of the year.

• Johnson’s margin of error: Steve Scalise is back on Capitol Hill and is in remission, which is surely a relief to Mike Johnson and the rest of House G.O.P. leadership after their failed whipping of last week’s Alejandro Mayorkas impeachment vote. But Republicans won’t have much of a reprieve if they lose the special election to fill Santos’s seat in New York’s 3rd district tomorrow. The final advertising competitive charts showed Democrats spending $4.2 million on the airwaves vs. the Republicans’ $2 million. (This does not include direct mail and digital advertising.) Republicans can look forward to a helpful vacancy in New York’s 26th District, where Democrat Brian Higgins just resigned, but it’s a safe seat, virtually guaranteed to stay in the Democratic column.

  It’s always debatable whether special elections are crystal balls for the fall elections. But both parties had a rough week and need some good news. For Republicans, a victory for their candidate, Mazi Pilip, would come in spite of Democrats outspending them by millions in support of their prized nominee, Tom Suozzi. On the other hand, if Democrats win, they will extend their special election streak—an indicator, perhaps, that they’ve stanched their political bleeding on Long Island.

That turned out to be wishful thinking. Late in the second quarter, American Values 2024, a Super PAC supporting Robert F. Kennedy Jr., cut through the clutter of another Temu-infected commercial break with a lively 30-second campaign ad touting Kennedy’s gadfly presidential bid. It was a reboot of a famous 1960 campaign spot run by his uncle, John F. Kennedy, a faux-newsreel scroll with tintype-looking photos of R.F.K. Jr., accompanied by a “Kennedy Kennedy Kennedy” jingle meant to evoke Camelot nostalgia.

Kennedy, of course, is currently an outcast in his own family, a consequence of his obvious vanity and defiant views on vaccines and autism. After the ad popped, his relatives reacted with fury. Bobby Shriver, the son of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, tweeted, “My cousin’s Super Bowl ad used our uncle’s faces—and my Mother’s. She would be appalled by his deadly health care views.” Kennedy himself replied to Shriver, saying he had no input on the ad, given F.E.C. rules governing coordination between campaigns and Super PACs. “I’m so sorry if the Super Bowl advertisement caused anyone in my family pain,” Kennedy said.

The advertisement hurt feelings within the Kennedy clan. It was free of policy and substance. It ripped off J.F.K.’s good name. And, given that American Values 2024 is largely funded by Donald Trump donor Timothy Mellon, it could also be a mischief-making op designed to screw with Biden in 2024. But the ad was something else, too: It was pretty good!

It was jaunty, distinctive, and low-stakes. It stood out from the tedious onslaught of celebrities announcing their phony endorsements of mayonnaise and travel websites. Sure, it cost about $7 million to run a 30-second spot during the Super Bowl. But given the behemoth size of the audience—predicted to be in the ballpark of 120 million people—it was a steal. “There’s no question it was a clever and brilliant $7 million dollar expenditure,” said Nick Everhart, a Republican ad-maker and media-buyer based in Ohio. “The non-leaking of the ad made the moment that much more out of the blue and impactful. It took over social media, and amid a flurry of ads that were playing into Gen-X and millennial nostalgia, this one deftly played in Boomer and greatest generation nostalgia as well.”

Political junkies already knew Kennedy was running. Those were precisely the types fighting on Twitter all night over whether the Kennedy ad was smart or just a colossal waste of money. But the vast majority of Americans aren’t political junkies. They aren’t thinking about the election right now—and if they are, they’re likely expressing dismay at the seemingly inevitable ballot choice between Biden and Trump. At this early stage of any election cycle, campaign ads aren’t supposed to be about voter persuasion or getting out the vote. The goal is more simple: To introduce a candidate or a concept to the electorate. More sophisticated targeting comes later. “If you didn’t before Sunday, now you know there’s a Kennedy for president on the ballot,” Everhart told me.

After the spot ran, Google search interest for Kennedy spiked by 1,200 percent. If brand awareness was the goal, mission accomplished.

So far, Kennedy has only gathered enough signatures to get on the 2024 ballot in one state: Utah. He has a long way to go in that effort—and perhaps the super PAC should be devoting all of its available cash to the signature-collecting rather than splashy Super Bowl ads. But the ad was powerful enough to get under the skin of both the White House and the Trump campaign. After I mused on Twitter that the ad was decent, senior Trump strategist Chris LaCivita took a break from his Sunday bottle of Burgundy and replied, “I love ya @PeterHamby but you are smarter than this.” Trump goon Roger Stone also slammed the ad as a waste of campaign money.

Over on the blue team, the Democratic National Committee called attention to the F.E.C. complaint they filed over the weekend against Kennedy and his super PAC, alleging improper coordination. Other Democrats highlighted Mellon’s support for Kennedy, accusing R.F.K. Jr. of being a Trump-funded spoiler. What’s clear from all of their responses is that even if they don’t take Kennedy seriously as a person, Democrats and Republicans alike take him seriously as a potential threat. Polling shows Kennedy taking votes from both Biden and Trump, and, as I wrote over the summer, his presence on swing state ballot tests usually ends up helping Trump win.

After seeing the R.F.K. spot, I texted one Democrat friend—a Biden supporter—telling him I thought it was good. The response? “Yep. We are so fucked.”

The paper makes the case that a two-term president can actually become president again: by becoming someone else’s vice president, and then assuming the higher office when that president steps aside. What my friend was getting at, in a fit of desperation and magical thinking, is that Biden could abandon Kamala Harris, and then appoint none other than Barack Obama as his running mate. Then, upon winning, Biden could step aside and allow Obama to finish his term, saving the Democratic Party from itself—and saving the country from Trump.

Yes, crazy. No, it won’t happen. It was (mostly) a joke. But the professional class of the Democratic Party is absolutely freaking out right now, even if White House surrogates spent the weekend on Sunday shows trying to calm the waters. Biden’s old age was always going to be one of his chief weaknesses heading into the election. It was a vulnerability, too, back in 2020 (although Biden looks positively spry back then compared to now).

But unlike the economy—which can be tweaked, manipulated, and juiced—age isn’t fixable. Biden is only going to get older. It can’t be stopped, only managed. If he seems slow now, forgetting names of world leaders and letting sentences evaporate into the breeze without any punctuation, imagine what he’ll look like in October during the presidential debates. Or in two years. The age thing just feels more acute lately, with or without Hur’s bitter, 345-page screed. You can see it.

Obama won’t ride in on Richard Branson’s jet at the last minute to help. But what if Biden does decide—after having a few of his cherished family meetings in the coming weeks and months—to actually call it quits? Or what if a genuine health scare compels him to bow out at the last minute? It’s not completely out of the realm of possibility. And while questions about his fitness are dominating headlines right now, it’s also worth remembering that politically, Biden is a historically weak incumbent. His average approval rating hasn’t been north of 40 percent since May 2023. He hasn’t been above 45 percent approval since September of 2021.

The White House insists that Biden can still win with a shitty approval rating, because the choice on the ballot between him and Trump will be so dramatic and obvious to voters. Consumer sentiment is also improving, finally, and the stock market just hit an all-time high. But it’s still a white-knuckle risk to run for reelection with such abysmal favorability. It could also be seen as “historically selfish,” as longtime political writer Walter Shapiro put it in a column on Monday.

If Biden stepped aside, it would be too late for other Democrats to jump in and compete in primaries for the nomination. Primaries are generally state-run affairs, and the filing deadlines for most of them have passed. A nomination at the convention is probably not what the Democratic Party would want either, although I’m sure they would try to figure out a way to make it as transparent and televised as possible, to avoid the appearance of a smoke-filled room (or whatever fills a room for Democrats in the absence of tobacco products).

One option, from my conversations with various Democrats, would be for the D.N.C. to get state parties to organize their own last-minute caucuses or conventions to award delegates before the convention in August. That would make for an expensive sprint for the candidates who decide to jump in the race, and the process would favor Democrats who could raise a ton of money quickly—people like billionaire Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, or California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Kamala Harris, too, would join with formidable institutional support from the party.

I’m mostly just summarizing some of the daydreams being shared by worried Democrats in recent days. Biden is still the horse. And for all the talk of his stilted memory and verbal flubs, he was punchy on Monday in a speech to the National Association of Counties Legislative Conference—a reminder that while his public performances are iffy on some days, on others, he’s still got the Biden charm. “I know I don’t look like it, but I’ve been around a while,” Biden told the crowd, smiling and crisp throughout. “I do remember that.” The audience ate it up.

I talked to longtime Biden friend and fundraiser Dick Harpootlian about the latest round of Democratic bed-wetting on Monday. Harpootlian, a lawyer and South Carolina state Senator, attacked Hur for delivering an agenda-driven report that seems like it was written in Mar-a-Lago. But he also called on Biden to fire his personal attorney, Bob Bauer, who allowed Biden to sit for five hours of interviews with Hur over two days in October, just after Hamas had unleashed its attack on Israel. “I never in a million years would let my client sit down with a prosecutor for five hours and not break it up,” Harpootlian told me. “Those interviews are intense. It’s legal malpractice to do what Bauer did. I don’t think Biden is being well-served by those around him.”

As for Biden’s health, Harpootlian said he sat with the president at dinner in Columbia last month, and said he was “animated, articulate, engaged, and the Joe Biden I have known for 30 years.” Verbal flubs, Harpootlian said, come with the territory. “Biden has committed malapropisms his entire life,” he said. “The idea he would stumble over somebody’s name, he’s been doing that for 30 years! That is not a sign of aging. That’s just Biden.”

Sure, Harpootlian was sounding like a lot of Biden defenders lately—but then again, what else is there to say?

“Biden needs to embrace this age issue,” Harpootlian went on. “Yes, he has memory problems. We all do from time to time, especially when you’re over 75. But this election is going to be about him and Donald Trump. Biden needs to say, ‘Yeah, I’m old, but I don’t want to be a dictator. Yeah, I’m old, but I didn’t appoint judges who overturned Roe v. Wade. Yeah, I’m old, but I think we need NATO because Vladimir Putin wants to re-create the old Soviet Union.’ He needs to get out there, with or without a press gaggle, and talk to regular people about these things. The economy is getting better, inflation is getting better. We are on the right track. But I have no concerns about his competence.”