BIDEN’S AGE-OLD QUESTION
A ‘respecter of fate,’ president mulls bid for reelection as he celebrates his 80th birthday
WASHINGTON — People in their 80s lead countries, create majestic art and perform feats of endurance. One entered the record books for scaling Mount Everest. It’s soon time for Joe Biden, 80 on Sunday, to decide whether he has one more mountain to climb — the one to a second term as president.
Questions swirl now, in his own party as well as broadly in the country, about whether he’s got what it takes to go for the summit again.
The oldest president in U.S. history, Biden hits his milestone birthday at a personal crossroads as he and his family face a decision in the coming months on whether he should announce for reelection. He’d be 86 at the end of a potential second term.
Biden aides and allies all say he intends to run — and his team has begun quiet preparations for a campaign — but it has often been the president himself who has sounded the most equivocal. “My intention is that I run again,” he said at a news conference this month. ”But I’m a great respecter of fate.”
“We’re going to have discussions about it,” he said. Aides expect those conversations to pick up in earnest over Thanksgiving and Christmas, with a decision not until well after New Year’s.
Biden planned to celebrate his birthday at a family brunch in the White House on Sunday.
To observe Biden at work is to see a leader tap a storehouse of knowledge built up over a half century in public office as he draws on deep personal relationships at home and abroad, his mastery of policy and his familiarity with how Washington works or doesn’t. In short, the wisdom of the aged.
“There is something to be said for experience,” said Dartmouth College historian Matt Delmont as he noted the dozens of global leaders in their 80s.
But to observe Biden is also to see him walk now often with a halting gait, in contrast to his trotting on stage on election night 2020.
It is to see him take a pass on a formal dinner with other world leaders without a real explanation, as happened on his trip abroad this past week, when he twice spoke of visiting Colombia when he meant Cambodia.
Biden’s verbal flubs have been the stuff of legend throughout his fivedecade political career, so sussing out the impact of age on his acuity is a guessing game for “armchair gerontologists,” as Dr. S. Jay Olshansky, an aging expert, puts it.
But in the distorted mirrors of social media, every slip is magnified into supposed proof of decline.
When Biden tumbled on his bicycle in Delaware in June, his foot or feet caught in the pedals’ cages, the mishap fed the perception of a president not at the top of his game.
“Those of us that know a little about aging were pretty impressed by the fact that he was on his bicycle to begin with ... that you’ve got somebody who is really active and healthy for his age,” said Olshansky.
Some allies see Biden’s blunders as an increasing vulnerability in the eyes of voters as he’s grown older.
In an AP survey of the electorate this month, fully 58% of voters said he does not have the mental capability to serve effectively as president. Only 34% said he’s a strong leader.
But two months before the 2020 election, Olshansky, at the University of Illinois, Chicago, published a paper that predicted Biden — and Donald Trump — were bound to maintain their good health beyond the end of this presidential term.
Based on a scientific team’s evaluation of available medical records, family history and other information, the paper concluded that both men are probably “super-agers,” a subgroup of people who maintain their mental and physical functioning and tend to live longer than the average person their age.
Nothing has changed Olshansky’s mind about either of them.
“While President Biden may chronologically be 80 years old, biologically he probably isn’t,” he said. “And biological age is far more important than chronological age.” He calls Biden a “classic example of everything that’s good about aging ... and so his age, I think, should be almost completely irrelevant.”