White House bid
Based on a scientific team’s evaluation of available medical records, family history and other information, the paper further 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.”
Biden is already in the club of high achievers for people his age. Unlike 92% of people 75 and over in the U.S., he still has a job, not to mention a mightily demanding one.
And he’s been on a roll. The November elections produced the best result for a Democratic president’s party in midterms in decades — despite the poison pill of high inflation — as Democrats kept control of the Senate, narrowly lost the House in defiance of expectations of a rout, and won several competitive governors’ races in key states. The president also sealed a string of consequential legislative victories in recent months, on climate, infrastructure, health care expansion, military aid to Ukraine and more.
Biden says he begins most days with an 8 a.m. workout, when he is usually joined by his personal trainer and physical therapist, Drew Contreras, if he doesn’t ride his Peloton bike.
“If I let it go for a week, I feel it,” he told the “Smartless” podcast recently. “I used to be able to go for a week and nothing would change.”
White House aides say Biden reads his briefing book deep into the night, holds intensive evening meetings with advisers and has never balked at their scheduling requests that may have him out late, though rarely up early.
Yet his aides are deeply protective of the president, especially with his public schedule, which is lighter than those of Barack Obama and George W. Bush, both far younger in office. They’ve shielded him from formal interviews and, until recently, press conferences.
To his doubters, he says: “Watch me.”
Biden has been diagnosed with several very common age-related health conditions, none causing him serious problems.
In his November 2021 summary of Biden’s health after the president’s first full physical in office, Dr. Kevin O’Connor noted Biden’s gait had become somewhat stiffer, something doctors watch for in older patients as it could signal a fall risk.
But after testing, the doctor concluded it’s mostly due to ongoing “wear and tear” arthritis of the spine, as well as compensation for a broken foot sustained a year earlier and the development of “mild peripheral neuropathy” or subtle damage to some sensory nerves in the feet.
Experts say age is not destiny; what matters is good health, fitness and functioning. Japanese climber Yuichiro Miura had enough of those attributes to make it to the top of Mount Everest in 2013 at age 80, setting a record that an 85-year-old Nepali man died trying to break in 2017.
Growing old is inexorable — at whatever pace, it comes.
It came at one pace for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, for example, and it’s coming at another for Pelosi, who is another institution in town.
“What’s wrong with me?” Marshall asked upon his decision to retire from the Supreme Court at age 82, before answering: “I’m old. I’m getting old and coming apart.” (He died two years later.)
At the same age, Pelosi buzzes Capitol hallways in high heels, outpacing much younger people. And her cognitive abilities have never been in question.
The knock against her was that she blocked the highest ambitions of generations of younger lawmakers before her decision this past week not to seek reelection as House Democratic leader when Republicans take control.
Supreme Court justices, shielded from the electorate and bosses, can grow as old in the job as they want and as fate allows — and they tend to stick around. Justice John Paul Stevens retired in 2010 at age 90, attributing his decision to a small stroke while reading his Citizens United dissent from the bench.
Ruth Bader Ginsberg, a hugely consequential 80-something, fell three years short of her goal to be as old as Stevens on the bench. She died in September 2020.
In democracies, where voters are the boss, and in autocracies, where they’re not, eople in power soldier on in their advanced years, even if few are up there like former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who became the world’s oldest leader at 92 and is running to get the office back, at 97.
Much of the leadership in the U.S. Congress is over 70, especially Democrats, and so were Biden’s main rivals in the 2020 Democratic primaries and Trump.