Old Man Biden
The problem that won't go away.
In the comments to yesterday’s post, “Biden ‘An Elderly Man with a Poor Memory’,” my friend and co-blogger Steven Taylor notes that, despite being a quarter century younger than the President, he has long had issues with remembering dates, concluding,
Quite clearly Biden is old, but the reducing of all of his mental faculties down to specific examples is ludicrous. I bet every single person reading this said something yesterday that, if taken in isolation, would make them sound like an dottering fool.
While I’ve always been really good at dates, I’ve long been pretty bad with names—an issue that has increased significantly in recent years. I’m 58 and have no reason to think I’m going senile.
As for Biden, he’s clearly slowing down with age and is having more of these mental lapses. But, while I wish there were a younger option available, I think he’s still mentally up to the job—and light years better than the seeming alternative, Donald Trump.
Alas, this isn’t an objective conversation. People are looking at both candidates through partisan lenses and, like it or not, Biden’s gaffes are judged much more harshly than Trump’s.
NPR’s Domenico Montanaro (“Biden’s rough week highlights his biggest vulnerability — one he can’t change“):
The special counsel report about Biden’s handling of classified material didn’t charge him with a crime, but special counsel Robert Hur, a Republican, seemed to go out of his way to include damning commentary about Biden’s supposedly faulty memory, like referencing that Biden, 81, “did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.”
That was stinging.
“It clears him legally and kneecaps him politically,” Paul Begala, a veteran Democratic strategist and former Bill Clinton adviser, said of the report.
The 388-page report set off a political firestorm — and an ensuing clumsy response from the White House and the president himself.
Biden angrily rejected Hur’s claim, saying Thursday night in a press conference he felt questions about Beau weren’t “any of their damn business.”
The president got choked up while showing a rosary he was wearing on his wrist in memory of Beau, then thundered, “I don’t need anyone to remind me when he passed away.”
If Biden had left it at that, that might be what people remembered about the news conference.
Instead, Biden wound up walking right into the stereotype laid out by Hur when he mistakenly said that President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi of Egypt was the “president of Mexico” while answering a question about current hostage negotiations with Israel and Hamas.
It’s a mistake. Verbal slips happen. Everyone makes them — including Trump, who is only four years younger than Biden. Trump often meanders, recently appeared to confuse his primary opponent Nikki Haley for former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi; on more than half a dozen occasions in the past year mistakenly referred to former President Barack Obama when he should have said Biden; and while in Iowa, called “Sioux City” “Sioux Falls,” which is 90 miles up the road in South Dakota.
But because more Americans are concerned with Biden’s age and fitness to do the job in a second term than they are about Trump’s age, every time Biden makes a flub it will have more resonance politically.
“It’s certainly true that anything that feeds the master negative narrative is especially harmful,” Begala said. “For [Bill] Clinton, it was cheating, for [George W.] Bush, it was ‘dumb,’ Obama ‘elitist,’ which is why when Obama said 57 states, it didn’t hurt him. If it was Bush, it would have.”
“Obviously with Biden, it’s ‘old.’ So, this really really hurts him.”
[…]
“Fair or not, this just amplified Biden’s greatest challenge,” David Axelrod, a former senior adviser in the Obama White House, said of the special counsel report. “It screams through every poll and focus group.”
Axelrod went viral back in November for raising whether it was “wise” for Biden to run for reelection after a series of swing-state polls showed him losing to Trump.
“Many people have made a judgment about his age and command and discount his accomplishments and attribute every problem to it,” Axelrod said.
The Atlantic‘s Yair Rosenberg (“What Biden’s Critics Get Wrong About His Gaffes“) tries to handwave this away:
[T]he truth is, mistakes like these are nothing new for Biden, who has been mixing up names and places for his entire political career. Back in 2008, he infamously introduced his running mate as “the next president of the United States, Barack America.” At the time, Biden’s well-known propensity for bizarre tangents, ahistorical riffs, and malapropisms compelled Slate to publish an entire column explaining “why Joe Biden’s gaffes don’t hurt him much.” The article included such gems as the time that then-Senator Biden told the journalist Katie Couric that “when the markets crashed in 1929, ‘Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He said, “Look, here’s what happened.”’” The only problem with this story, Slate laconically noted, was that “FDR wasn’t president then, nor did television exist.”
In other words, even a cursory history of Biden’s bungling shows that he is the same person he has always been, just older and slower—a gaffe-prone, middling public speaker with above-average emotional intelligence and an instinct for legislative horse-trading.
But he recognizes that there’s a perception problem and that the Biden team needs to address it head-on:
The president’s staff is understandably reluctant to put Biden front and center, knowing that his slower speed and inevitable gaffes—both real and fabricated—will feed the mental-acuity narrative. But in actuality, the bar for Biden has been set so laughably low that he can’t help but vault over it simply by showing up. By contrast, limiting his appearances ensures that the public mostly encounters the president through decontextualized social-media clips of his slipups.
As Slate observed in 2008, the frequency of Biden’s rhetorical miscues helped neutralize them in the eyes of the public. In 2024, Biden will have an assist from another source: Donald Trump. Among other recent lapses, the former president has called Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán “the leader of Turkey,” confused Nancy Pelosi and Nikki Haley, and repeatedly expressed the strange belief that he won the 2020 election. With an opponent prone to vastly worse feats of viscous verbosity, Biden can’t help but look better by comparison, especially if he starts playing offense instead of defense.
But none of this will happen by itself. If the president and his campaign want the headlines to be something other than “Yes, Biden Knows Who the President of Egypt Is,” they’ll have to start making news, not reacting to it.
This strikes me as wishful thinking. Few people watch these speeches and interviews in full. If the press seizes on the gaffes—and they will—that’s what most will remember.
Rosenberg’s colleague, Helen Lewis (“Biden’s Age Is Now Unavoidable“) is more concerned:
He is older than George W. Bush, who stopped being president in 2008, and older than Bill Clinton, who gave up the job in 2000. He is older than the hovercraft, the barcode, and the Breathalyzer. And he looks it: Biden’s likely Republican opponent, Donald Trump, a mere debutant at 77, is possessed with a bronzed, demonic energy that makes him seem vigorously alive, even when his words make no sense. Joe Biden looks like he is turning into a statue of Joe Biden.
[…]
In a poll last year, 77 percent of Americans, including 69 percent of Democrats, said Biden was too old to be president. (For Trump, the overall figure was 51 percent.) But so far, the conversation about Biden’s age among commentators on the left has run something like this: So, uh, Joe Biden is pretty old. Should we be worried about that? The observation has gone nowhere, because nothing else flows from it. No one has seriously challenged him for the nomination. His family members have not helped him save face by insisting he spend more time with them. His party lacks an obvious mechanism to quietly usher him offstage. Because of those unalterable facts, the conversation about whether he is too old to be president has stalled. Lots of people think he is. But they can do nothing about it. End of discussion.
[…]
Watch his 2016 convention speech: He looks venerable but energetic. Now he often looks sluggish and befuddled. In the past few years, we have seen reports, denied by his press team, that Biden follows a restricted schedule designed to keep him from becoming exhausted, and that his team has reportedly decided to insist that he wear sneakers on the campaign trail to avoid falls. He rarely sits for interviews. As of August, he had given the lowest number of presidential press conferences since Ronald Reagan. Throughout the 2020 election, COVID precautions kept him from spontaneous public settings; he did most of his campaigning via video. In this election campaign, any deficiencies will be much more on display.
My colleague McKay Coppins recently suggested that anyone who cares about politics should go to a Trump rally, to see what they were voting for (or against). “This might sound unpleasant to some; consider it an act of civic hygiene,” he wrote. I would suggest that everyone do the same with a Biden speech: Watch it in full, and ask yourself honestly if you believe that the man you see has another four years of presidential decision-making ahead of him. If not, then reconcile yourself to the fact that you are really voting for Kamala Harris, or for a regency similar to the final years of Reagan’s tenure in the White House.
To my mind, either scenario is still more comforting than Trump’s return to power. I say this particularly as a European, who is aware that Trump would not continue to support Ukraine, and my country and others would have to deal with an emboldened Vladimir Putin as a result. But I would also say, quietly to myself, that America is a country of more than 300 million people, many of them brilliant, many of them able to finish a sentence. So how can the presidential election come down to two old men, one riffing about shark attacks, and the other communing with the dead? It’s not too late for either party to offer the U.S. a better choice in November.
I honestly don’t think there’s a way out of this problem for Biden. He actually is a very old man. He looks it. He acts it. That his opponent is nearly as old and rather obviously in way worse shape, both physically and mentally, simply does not seem to be registering with the public. The laughably hideous spray tan and fake hair are apparently fooling a lot of people.
The good news for Biden is that the economy is genuinely getting better and there’s reason to hope public perception of it catches up well before November. And his opponent clearly has a rather low ceiling. It took almost a perfect storm for Trump to win the Electoral College vote despite getting 3 million fewer votes in 2016. Biden got 8 million more votes than Trump in 2020, winning 33 more Electoral Votes than needed. Even if Georgia and either Arizona or Wisconsin (the states he won by the narrowest margins last time) flipped back into Trump’s column in 2024, Biden would still eke out a win.
But, damn, it shouldn’t even be a close contest. Trump is a horrible human being who was an awful President. He tried to steal the 2020 election, fomenting a riot to do so. He’s been found to have committed rape by a preponderance of the evidence by a jury. He’s under multiple criminal indictments. And I’d give him a 45% chance of being re-elected.
We should use a tournament of intellectual and physical contests to determine the leader of our country. Combine the decathlon and a Jeopardy tournament.
Alternatively, we could look at his actual performance over the past three years.
I remember when Obama was criticized for playing golf too much; this criticism went away. Biden is criticized for deficit spending by people who didn’t complain about the greater deficits of his predecessor.
BTW, James’ quote of me, which includes “like an dottering fool” is a great example of how little errors happen.
I originally typed “like an idiot” and decided to change it to “like a dottering fool” but forgot to fix the “an.”
One could see this as a simple typo or one could assume I don’t know how to use articles.
The other day I used the word “peak” several times when I meant “peek”–does this mean that I am going senile? Does it mean I can’t read and write in English?
Ageism works much like racism, or any prejudice: you see an old/minority person do X and assume that X is caused by, or a consequence of, age/race. I have never, at any point in my life, been able to remember, well, humans. Due to the circumstances of my life, I see people as temporary objects. It’s always been a bit embarrassing. I have failed to recognize neighbors, colleagues, employees. But now that I am OLD that lack of memory is seen as a consequence of age. On the plus side it gives me an excuse, but OTOH, it leads to more assumptions by more people (who I will of course forget) about my general intellectual competence.
Ageism is not the most pernicious of prejudices, but it is nevertheless, a prejudice, an assumption. We should all be better observers, less easily subverted by presupposition. Many of our problems in this country might be fixed if at some point in grade school – not college, much earlier – we taught people something about epistemology. We should be teaching philosophy from an earlier age, but of course we can’t because: Christians. Jews and Muslims, too, but mostly Christians.
In general we should be more mature (le mot juste?) about the subject of age. I hate the ’69 years young,’ bullshit. No, I’m not young. I can perform basic math and discover that I’m a hell of a lot nearer the end than the start. I’m physically weaker, have less endurance, my voice ain’t what it was, and I’m taking a daily fistful of meds. But I’m also more patient, more tolerant, less angry than I was. Age changes you, and eventually kills you, but there are compensations.
Joe Biden works for us. He is an employee. Like any employee he should be judged on his work, not his race, gender, height, weight, hairstyle or ability to do push-ups. He’s very old. Is he still doing good work? Yes, he is. Will he still be competent four years from now? Unknown.
We have a binary choice: the competent and decent old fart, or the toxic creep who spews lies, is clearly unhinged, and shits his diaper and won’t change it. Not a hard choice. The ‘lesser of two evils’ decision has never been clearer.
February, there is time to mitigate this incident and in the end also provoke Trump into damaging himself.
And the most likely scenario is the US economy continues to improve in public perception towards November such that sentiment should be for ‘Independents’ rather improved at voting time with price stabilisation thanks to Fed sang froid and Biden admin knowing to play a wise game (the starting of attacks of Trump on his own appointment rather reflect this – reflecting how short-term nonsensical was the progressive panic about Fed and conspiratorial whinging about Fed & Trump).
If Biden & Co work to bait Trump and get Trump more visible again, rather suspect this will be nothing more than an episodic freak out. Had it happened in September rather different than February.
On the Biden front, Biden reminds me of a certain name partner in a white-shoe New York law firm back when in a time when I was working for a certain European megacorp locked in a legal death match with an American one in a NY law litigation (I shall be coy about names as rather too revealing) preparing for a multi-billion dollar litigation, civil trial. Billions in early 90s USD, real money.
That partner, of a similar age to Biden, one politely didn’t opine on a waivering voice or clear signs of age – the firm was not going put him on courtroom team if it came to that, but he was certainly leading legal strategy and thinking. We (or rather my employer) had literal billions at stake. Did not ask for a change as occasional waivering voice and a certain lagging endurance as it was our judgment that our billions were in the right strategic hands (and there was the right younger team for a court-room if it came to that.
Biden is the same. He remains competent in execution, and certainly even age diminished vastly more competent and reliable than Trump.
@Steven L. Taylor: Amusingly, I must have auto-corrected it in my brain, as I tend to correct typos and the like when quoting people from informal venues like Twitter/X or blog comments sections.
@Michael Reynolds: Yes, it’s prejudice but that it’s also rather obvious to me that Biden is in decline. That Trump is far worse in just about every way makes the binary choice clear. But it doesn’t mean that Biden isn’t really too damn old for another five years in the most demanding job in the world.
@James Joyner:
We no longer discriminate against women in employment because they might, some day, become pregnant despite the undeniable fact that women are more likely than men to become pregnant. Is Biden old? Yes. Does he look and sound old? Yes. Is he more likely than a younger man to become disabled in the next five years? Yes. Is he doing good work right now, today? Also yes. Is a quiver in the voice and slow movement across a stage proof that his judgment is questionable? No.
As with any employee the proof is in the product.
That said, I can calculate odds, and I wish – and said so at the time – that Joe had walked away with a win rather than risk losing. I wish he had a better Veep, because Kamala is about as consequential as Selena Meyer. I’d be happier with someone more effective in the role – Whitmer, Newsom, Cory Booker, etc…
The letting of the “elderly man with a poor memory” off from prosecution for willfully taking classified documents and likely sharing them with unauthorized individuals has pretty much made a re-run of the 2020 campaign from the basement impossible. If Biden is hidin’ then this official determination by the DOJ will rear its ugly head.
Speaking of which, I was thinking about he climax of ‘Miracle on 34th Street’ when the recognition by the federal government’s post office department is used to declare Kris Kringle is Santa Claus at least in the eyes of the court.
And we have the contrast of the USDOJ having determined Donald Trump being of sound mind to be prosecuted for the same crime that it is felt no jury would convict Joe Biden of due to his current age induced mental deficiencies
Biden is old.
Trump is old, demented, morally bankrupt, a self admitted and adjudicated sexual predator, con man, fraudster, racist, pos.
But Biden is old.
Did I mention that Biden is old?
He’s old.
Biden was old four years ago when he was elected (oldest first term president ever). So like all news, this issue shall also pass. The only redeeming thing about the SC report is that it was released so early in the election cycle unlike the Comey letter.
@OzarkHillbilly: And yet, 60-some percent of voters in New Hampshire wrote in his name in the primary and 90-some percent of voters in Nevada voted for him–with a larger total vote count than all Republican candidates combined. It doesn’t appear to me that the “69% of Democrat say Biden is too old” should be taken seriously as an actual objection to reelecting him. Then there’s always Helen Lewis’s observation:
@JKB:
Why is it so hard for you and other right wingers to acknowledge that at the core of Trump’s prosecution is the OBSTRUCTION part. Heck even the Sainted Jonathan Turley has noted this on Fox.
I mean yesterday you called me out for perpetuating mainstream media “lies” and here you are doing the same thing with right wing media lies of omission.
BTW, said lie? Making a joke out of the former President’s musings about how to fight COVID-19:
I think it’s real simple. If Biden is merely old and is forgetting things and names, it’s a problem, but not a big one. If Biden is suffering from dementia and this is being kept from the public, that’s a huge problem if it’s discovered before the election. It’s a huge problem regardless of politics, like Reagan in the second term or Nixon being a drunk and Kissinger having to tell the military to ignore his orders. But politically, that being discovered would probably be it for Biden.
@mattbernius:
Because Trump supporters are patholgical liars just like Trump.
@James Joyner:
Except he’s already doing the job quite well, better that any of the younger presidents of the past 25 years, or beyond.
The “most demanding job in the world” thing is our standard cliche, but meh. The job doesn’t require running marathons, performing open-heart surgery, controlling air traffic, or operating heavy equipment. Yes, a president has to juggle a constant stream of changing priorities and make a lot of stressful decisions. But your average teacher on her feet all day dealing with hundreds of kids and parents has a more empirically demanding job. Ditto combat soldiers. Perhaps even TSA agents and airline personnel, God bless them.
If Biden were failing at the job, I’d be more concerned about his aging. Instead, he’s a historically excellent president. So he’s clearly not too old to make foreign policy decisions, delegate responsibilities, sign laws, and nominate judges. What required job responsibilities can’t he do?
Personally, my concern re: Biden’s age is not about job performance, but his increased and increasing chances of rapid infirmity or dropping dead, as American men aged 77+ are wont to do. But Republicans raising that morbid reality is likely to backfire, given how forcefully Democrats are rallying against Hur’s nasty hit job. (I’m pleasantly surprised to see they learned from the far too muted reaction to Comey’s election interference.)
Was cooking and babysitting yesterday so didnt comment on the UV thing. At the time Trump commented on it UV light had not successfully been used to treat pulmonary infections. It still hasn’t. The issue is getting UV light through tissues. Unless we find some novel UV light effect we wont be doing it through the skin. That limits it to administering UV light via bronchoscopy. It would likely be a lengthy procedure in high risk patients likely to desaturate and would require multiple days of therapy. Even then it’s not clear that the depth of penetration would be adequate to affect outcomes. Most recent paper I saw had modeled using pulsed UV light but no one I am aware of has tried it yet.
Since this was in my field of expertise I thought Trump just sounded like a not very bright or medically/scientifically educated person trying to explain stuff he didnt understand. However, in the context of his actively promoting quack therapies like HCQ and Ivermectin it seems like he was trying to project more expertise than he owned, undercut the people with really expertise and also pander to the people who wanted to deny that covid was a real problem. I would have preferred that he, like every other president we have had, not interject himself into the specifics of medical care turning it into a political issue.
Steve
@DK:
Physically, sure. But we’ve managed to recruit tens of millions of people to do those jobs at any given time. POTUS makes multiple decisions on a daily basis that have massive consequences.
@steve:
Thanks for interrupting my dunking with your “facts”! Seriously, though, it’s great to get a professional read on that statement.
BTW, I agree with you that this is the ultimate crux of the issue:
Of course, those “experts” developed that “expertise” by going to *gasp* college, where they got WOKE and decided to become technocrats and, therefore, cannot be trusted.
I would vote for a dead cold Biden over a Live Trump. I don’t care. Done.
Simple as that. Democracy.
There is no other choice.
There’s a simple way to deal with this. Put together a post where you compare video of Trump speaking and moving in 2016 with how he speaks and moves today, and compare similar video of Biden. It would be very easy to do.
But I suspect no one here will put such a post together, for the same exact reason the Biden White House goes to such great lengths to keep Biden hidden from both the public and the press.
Feel free to try to sell that in a soundbite as the disinterested voters start tuning in.
Saw a montage of Biden speaking over the years. The contrast of even Biden of 2020 to Biden 2024 is striking.
@JKB: a montage is, perforce, an edited grouping designed to reflect the biases of the editor. Why, given enough opportunities, I can make you appear to be a not very bright apparatchik… ER, uh, oops. Sorry about that, Chief!
ETA most montages of your fearless leader makes him appear mean spirited, churish, spiteful, and disingenuous. Even the ones prepared by his own followers.
DK,
SHow me a picture of a teacher after 4 or 8 years of teaching.
Then look at Obama (or any other) after 4 and 8 years of the Presidency and admit your comparison between the rigors of these two respective jobs was completely vacuous.
It’s almost as if you’re a boomer.
@JKB:
Interesting, so you acknowledge the difference you said didn’t exist
I think “the government repeatedly asked for the documents back and Trump and staff lied and conspired to hide them” is a great start for a sound byte.
As is “Trump’s lawyers advised him to give back the papers and he acted against their advice.” Is another.