Joe Biden’s Age Matters Even More if He Wins

D o Joe Biden’s old age and visible decline still matter? The buzz after his generally well-received, stumble-free acceptance speech at the Democratic convention was that they don’t. But that just meant people were asking the wrong question. And Biden’s carefully stage-managed appearances since then have revived the question, given his apparent reliance on teleprompters to get through interviews (a touchy subject with his staffers) and use of pre-screened lists to control the questions he is asked.

Donald Trump and his allies have, of course, oversold the extent of Biden’s cognitive decline and decrepitude while Biden has been off the campaign trail. Biden’s partisans and sympathetic media figures tell us that this is all that matters. After all, Biden was fine reading a prepared, practiced speech to the Democratic convention, and now all he has to do is survive the debates against Trump. Of course, none of these people consider it a sign of great mental capacity when a Republican — Trump, Sarah Palin, George W. Bush — gets unscathed through reading a speech off a teleprompter.

The problem with this line of argument is that it implicitly, or explicitly, assumes that Biden is running only to defeat Trump. But if he wins, he will actually have to serve as the president. We should be concerned that he is not up to that task. The ability to read aloud a prepared text at age 77 in 2020 is something, but it is not much evidence of the ability to run the federal government at age 80 in 2022. Older candidates should be held to a higher standard to show that they can still handle the grueling demands of the job — and the pandemic has made it impossible for voters in the general election to watch Biden do that.

The undertow of old age comes for us all, eventually. The loss of mental acuteness and energy and physical vigor is not an all-or-nothing thing; it can creep up gradually, and then accelerate. And it never gets better. You don’t need to diagnose Biden in any clinical sense to recognize what our common sense tells us: He’s visibly not the man he once was, he won’t be again, and things can only go downhill from here. Biden has shown an increasingly short fuse on the campaign trail this cycle, reacting with anger as he called one voter a “lying, dog-faced pony soldier”:

and hectoring another voter with “look, fat,” calling him “a damn liar” and challenging him to a pushup contest:

This is the same Joe Biden who, in 2018, all but challenged Trump to a fistfight, a bizarre tangent he later regretted.

Democrats told us all of this about the toll of age on concentration, temperament, and stamina, loudly and often, when Ronald Reagan ran for president at age 69 in 1980, and again when Reagan ran for reelection at 73 in 1984, and again when Bob Dole ran at age 73 in 1996 (when Time magazine ran a cover story on whether he was too old for the job), and again when John McCain ran at age 72 in 2008. In McCain’s case, Democrats told us that his age required special scrutiny of his female running mate, Palin. In Reagan’s case, his critics are still claiming that the Alzheimer’s disease that claimed him in 2004 was already degrading his abilities two decades earlier. Now, they have decided for the moment that they no longer remember any of that.

Reagan proved how effective an older president can be, but in truth, Reagan was slowing in his second term, though he remained able to handle marathon summit meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev. He also had to undergo a surgery that required invoking the 25th Amendment to make Vice President Bush, briefly, the acting president. Dwight Eisenhower had even worse health issues. William Henry Harrison, the oldest president elected before Reagan, died a month into his term. So did Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945, after a campaign in which Democrats downplayed his failing health (one speaker at the convention complained that if FDR was too old and tired to continue, so was Josef Stalin — as if that was a rebuttal). James Buchanan, the fourth-oldest man elected president, dithered while the nation slid into civil war. There is little question that Reagan, for all his physical hardihood and strength of will, was no longer up to the task of serving a third term beginning in 1989. Yet, he was younger on the day he left office than Joe Biden would be on the day of his inauguration.

Moreover, for those of us who find Kamala Harris and the activist elements of the Democratic Party more alarming than Biden himself, Biden’s age and palpably failing strength and will are real worries. Biden is no prize even on his best day: Among other things, he’s a notorious serial fabulist, he’s always been part of the liberal wing of his party, and he’s been wrong on just about every foreign-policy question of the past half century. But the genuinely reassuring things about Biden — his empathy, his unwoke old-timey American patriotism, his baseline of respect for our governing institutions, his support for law enforcement and big business — are of no use if he is too weak to impose those things on his own administration. The signs from his campaign suggest that he is easily bullied into abandoning even positions he has held consistently for four decades. Just this week, after Harris referred to a “Harris administration, together with Joe Biden as president,” Biden did the same thing the next day.

The danger of letting Harris gain power is the key dividing line between Biden and Trump on the question of age, even more so than the fact that Trump is four years younger than Biden. If Trump fades into the sunset, power devolves to Mike Pence and conventional Republicans — an improvement over Trump. By contrast, a major part of the case for voting Biden is precisely the fiction that he will be a restraining influence on his party.

The tug of war between an aging figurehead and his younger, more intensely motivated subordinates is unlikely to be won by the vacillating old man. Biden’s age and status as a people-pleaser combine to raise serious questions about his ability to resist the more extreme elements of his party. Proving he can still read a prepared speech changes none of that.