It’s happy b’day, Joe, & good luck

WASHINGTON — President-elect Joe Biden turned 78 on Friday.

In two months, he’ll take the reins of a politically fractured nation facing the worst public health crisis in a century, high unemployment and a reckoning on racial injustice.

As he wrestles with those issues, Biden (photo) will be attempting to accomplish another feat: demonstrate to Americans that age is but a number and he’s up to the job.

Biden will be sworn in as the oldest president in the nation’s history, displacing Ronald Reagan, who left the White House in 1989 when he was 77 years and 349 days old.

T h r o u g h o u tt the campaign,, President Trump,,

74, didn’t misss a chance too highlight Biden’ss gaffes and arguee that the Demo-crat lacked thee mental acuity too lead the nation. Both critics and some backers of Biden worried that he was sending the wrong message about his stamina by keeping a relatively light public schedule while Trump barnstormed battleground states. Biden attributed his light schedule to being cautious during the coronavirus pandemic.

Some of Biden’s rivals in the Democratic primary also made a case on age — while skipping Trump’s vitriol — by raising the question of whether someone of Biden’s and Trump’s generation was the right person to lead a nation dealing with issues like climate change and racial inequality.

Biden, in a September interview with CNN, promised to be “totally transparent” about all facets of his health if elected but he hasn’t said how he’ll do that.

The campaign has made the case that Biden isn’t your average septuagenarian.

His physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, in a medical report released by the campaign in December, described Biden as “healthy, vigorous ... fit to successfully execute the duties of the presidency, to include those as chief executive, head of state and commander in chief.”

O’Connor reported that Biden works out five days a week. The president-elect told supporters that during the pandemic he has relied on home workouts involving a Peloton bike, treadmill and weights.

In 1988, Biden suffered two life-threatening brain aneurysms, an experience that he wrote in his memoir shaped him into the “kind of man I want to be.”