The old story: Biden team veers from humour to hardball to tackle age issue
Joe Biden began his press conference at the JW Marriott Hotel Hanoi in Vietnam at 9.09pm local time. “Good evening, everyone – it is evening, isn’t it?” he said, prompting laughter. About 25 minutes later, the 80-year-old US president had another quip: “I don’t know about you, but I’m going to go to bed.”
Headline writers pounced. The Daily Beast website declared: “Biden Wraps Up G20 Conference by Announcing ‘I’m Going to Bed’”. But unusually, the White House fired back. Ben LaBolt, its communications director, retorted sarcastically on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter: “Presidents shall never sleep. Not even at night after days of marathon meetings overseas. Sage guidance from the Daily Beast. Next up in the series: presidents shall never eat.”
The riposte, combined with sharp pushback from LaBolt’s colleagues, suggested a newly pugnacious approach from Biden’s communications team over that most delicate of subjects: his age.
A recent opinion poll by SSRS for the CNN network found declining shares of Democratic-aligned voters see Biden as inspiring confidence or having the stamina and sharpness to serve effectively as president. Asked to name their biggest concern about his candidacy in 2024, nearly half directly mentioned his age.
As a white man with a bluecollar background, Biden has effectively neutralised many familiar Republican attack lines on race, gender or class elitism. But the prospect of him being 86 at the end of a second term has provided fodder for critics. Nikki Haley, a former South Carolina governor running for the Republican presidential nomination, has called for mental competency tests for candidates over 75 and warned that Biden will almost certainly be replaced by Vice-President Kamala Harris before the end of a second term.
This week, David Ignatius, a venerable foreign affairs columnist for the Washington Post newspaper, lavished praise on Biden’s legislative achievements before contending that he and Harris should not run again. He wrote: “It’s painful to say that, given my admiration for much of what they have accomplished. But if he and Harris campaign together in 2024, I think Biden risks undoing his greatest achievement – which was stopping Trump.”
Biden’s age is a problem that poses a unique challenge for the White House and the president’s re-election campaign. Some have advised them to embrace it as evidence of his experience, knowledge and wisdom. Jeffrey Katzenberg, a film producer and media
proprietor, remarked earlier this year: “President Biden’s age is, in fact, his superpower.”
But Frank Luntz, a consultant and pollster who has advised numerous Republican campaigns, described that as the “single dumbest political advice I have ever seen”. He explained: “Americans just say 80 is too old for being an effective president. The key is that Democrats are saying enough already, thank you for your service but don’t run for president, we need somebody else.”
Biden’s likely rival in next year’s election, former president Donald Trump, is just three years younger, but Luntz counsels Democrats against emphasising that point. “They can’t do that because Trump may be 77 but he acts seven.”
Biden’s Asia excursion illustrated the messaging opportunities and pitfalls around the issue. The White House points out that he “literally” travelled around the world – more than 18,000 miles – in under five days and met 20plus foreign leaders. It gleefully quoted Peter Doocy, a reporter at the conservative Fox News network, who said from Hanoi: “He has basically been working all through the night. The equivalent of an all-nighter.”
But the climactic press conference was interpreted by some as feeding into an existing narrative seen in Franklin Foer’s recent book, The Last Politician, which reported that Biden holds strikingly few morning meetings or public events before 10am and occasionally admits feeling tired.
A report on CNN’s website said the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, had “abruptly” ended the session and foregrounded Biden’s comment about “going to bed”. It did not go unanswered. Olivia Dalton, principal deputy press secretary, set out Biden’s very long day on X and demanded: “What will be enough?” LaBolt targeted the author of the article, adding: “The desk jockey who wrote this utter BS was not present at the press conference or the trip.”
It was an unusually personal, bareknuckle approach from an administration that has condemned Trump’s frequent attacks on “fake news” and pledged to defend the freedom of the press.
Robyn Patterson, an assistant White House press secretary, defended the responses to negative coverage, saying via email: “At the conclusion of the trip, President Biden held a press conference in the standard format. The President was scheduled to take five questions – he ended up taking seven.
“He gave detailed answers on questions ranging from the US-China relationship, to his Indo Pacific strategy and climate change. When we see unfair spin that omits or downplays key facts and narratives ripped straight from right-wing Twitter, it’s our job to call that out.”
Political analysts contend that calling out individual members of the media is unlikely to win friends in the long term.
Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, said: “I don’t think it’s wise. When you make things personal like that it doesn’t serve any positive purpose. No journalist who gets called out is going to all of a sudden go, ‘Oh, you’re right, I see it your way now, let me bend to your will.’ If anything, it makes the White House look overly defensive and overly concerned and a little touchy.”
Reporters are not the problem but YouTube videos and TV coverage are, argues Charlie Sykes, editor of the Bulwark website and a former conservative radio host.
“It is out there. The question of Joe Biden’s age comes up in every single conversation with every voter in America and that’s not going to go away and you can’t just simply spin that by beating up on reporters. People are watching Joe Biden very carefully.”
The White House does need to rebut rightwing media claims that Biden is senile, Sykes added, because there is no evidence that he is unable to do the job. “But it seems naive to me to not recognise how the visuals undermine their message. The visuals of someone with a very stiff and wandering gait who sometimes loses the thread of conversation in these unstructured environments clearly is going to hurt them.
“What really haunts me is what if we’re having this conversation in September or October of 2024. What if there is a Mitch McConnell-like episode [the Senate minority leader has frozen twice at press conferences] with the president in the fall of 2024, especially when Joe Biden may be the only thing that stands between this country and the constitutional disaster of a second Trump term?”
Before Biden and Trump, the oldest American president was Ronald Reagan. When, at a debate in 1984, the moderator reminded him of this fact
Reagan, then 73, replied: “I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” Even his Democratic opponent, Walter Mondale, laughed at the line. Reagan won re-election in a landslide.
Biden himself appears to have borrowed from the Reagan playbook, deploying self-deprecating humour and taking a less combative approach than his aides. He has joked about serving in the Senate 180 years ago and knowing “Jimmy” Madison, who was president in the early 19th century. At this year’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner he made fun of his age several times.
Chris Whipple, a journalist and author of The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House, believes this is a more fruitful way of handling the issue than going on the offensive. He said: “The answer is humour, not anger. It makes them look desperate when they get angry. The communications people in the White House should take a page from the boss and just try to keep a sense of humour.”
The challenges facing Biden, who turns 81 in November, were underlined this week when Republicans in the House of Representatives announced an impeachment inquiry into unproven allegations of corruption and his son, Hunter, was indicted on three criminal counts related to his alleged illegal possession of a gun.
His re-election effort will also include more travel and voter interaction than during the coronavirus pandemic lockdowns of 2020. Last week his campaign team released a video about his surprise visit to Ukraine, referencing that it was a near 40-hour journey that started at 4am and involved a nine-anda-half-hour train journey to Kyiv. They can also point to Biden’s triumphant verbal sparring with Republicans at this year’s State of the Union address.
But there will have to be enough to drown out the many clips circulating on rightwing media of Biden falling off a bike near his Delaware beach house last year or tripping over a sandbag at the Air Force Academy commencement a few months ago. The president’s gaffes, a hallmark of his long political career, now tend to be seen through the prism of a fading octogenarian.
Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington and former White House official, noted that Biden had been making his case in speeches across the country and called for a sense of perspective. “His age will only be a liability if he’s running against somebody young,” she said. “It’s not going to be a liability running against Trump. You’ve just got to look at the guy.
“All that’s happened is so far the Republicans have been more aggressive on the age issue. But this is people throwing stones at glass houses. Trump is a walking heart attack, he looks a mess, he’s overweight and he talks in frequently incoherent babble. I don’t know if it’s dementia or just plain old stupidity. At least Joe Biden says things that make sense.”
When we see unfair spin that omits or downplays key facts and narratives, it’s our job to call that out
White House aide Robyn Patterson
“We’re not doing the pronoun Olympics in the state of Florida,” he told the conference.
Trailing Trump in opinion polls, DeSantis brought some attendees to their feet by barking: “Do not tell me that a man can become a woman. Do not tell me that a man can get pregnant and expect me to accept that.”
DeSantis’s book The Courage to Be Free was on sale at the conference venue, the Omni Shoreham Hotel, along with titles such as Busting the Barricades by Laura Ingraham, Tucker (about the rightwing host Tucker Carlson) by Chadwick Moore, Blackout by Candace Owens, Woke Inc by Vivek Ramaswamy, The Art of the Deal by Donald Trump and The Greatest Speeches of Donald J Trump.
Attendees wandered through an exhibition hall offering “biblically responsible retirement plans”, “science and statistics for the pro-life movement” and Christian-friendly children’s books. A whiteboard asked people to write their favorite scripture while a lifesize cardboard cutout of Ronald Reagan had a speech bubble playing on one of 40th president’s most famous lines with : “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this hall!”
The backdrop helped imbue religious conservatives with confidence that the presidential contenders will keep their values front and centre.
Anita Stine, 84, a Trump supporter from Irvine, California, said: “I believe that the Republican candidates are going to pursue them strongly because they’re biblical. Not take a life through abortion, not try to claim that you’re a man when you’re a woman – the principles in the Bible are just put right there for us to read and to follow and God’s word is truth.”
But many interviewed by the Guardian tempered such optimism with the hard-headed realism and patience that was rewarded with the fall of Roe v Wade after nearly 50 years of striving.
Michael Case, 68, from Beltsville, Maryland, said: “I want the candidate that’s going to win. I’m very focused on winning this year. So if I had to pick right this second, I would pick Trump.”
Case, who is retired from working at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, personally favors a federal abortion ban at six weeks or even less but acknowledged: “I’m still against abortion but you’ve got to recognize that there are a lot of people who have a different view and so we need to turn their hearts and minds and that takes a little time. It’s OK to be a little bit pragmatic and win.”
Younger voters agree on the need for step-by-step expediency. Lily Tu, 19, a student from Stockton, California, praised Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, who during the first Republican primary debate pointed out that a national abortion ban would not pass the Senate and urged Americans to “stop demonising” the issue.
“I like Nikki Haley’s approach because she seems really down to earth in the way that she was having realistic expectations,” she said. “If they’re promising immediate change, that’s not really going to happen. But I trust in those who will take the smaller steps that will maybe lead towards that ultimate goal.”
Jimmy Hammond, 74, a pastor from Lumberton, North Carolina, and a Vietnam war veteran, is adamantly opposed to abortion. “It’s not a political issue with me; it’s a biblical issue,” he said. “Abortion is not right: it’s killing the child and a woman don’t have that right with her body because God gave her her body.”
Hammond is sceptical that any of the candidates will take such a hard line on this or other religious right priorities. He said: “I’m not at all confident any of them would do what is right about it. They’re going to do what’s politically motivating them most of the time.”
Trump, who bills himself as the “most pro-life president” in American history, has been deliberately vague on where the movement goes post-Roe. In June he said: “What I’ll do is negotiate so people are happy.” His reluctance to endorse a federal ban has exposed him to attacks from Susan B Anthony Pro-Life America, a major anti-abortion group, and others on the right.
Pence told reporters on Friday: “He promised to govern as a conservative in 2016 but what I want voters to know is he makes no such promise today. In fact, President Trump has actually blamed election losses in 2022 on overturning Roe versus Wade. He’s joined other voices in this campaign trying to marginalize the right to life as a stateonly issue.”
Trump’s circumspection may have cost him the vote of Ken Oliver, 59, from Williamsburg, Virginia, who said he prefers the clarity of DeSantis on abortion and gender identity. “Former president Trump, despite all the merits and many good things he did, is relatively weak in comparison to other candidates, and especially governor DeSantis, on these issues, which are core issues for social conservatives.”
Oliver believes that a federal abortion ban can be achieved incrementally. “We’re not looking back. We’re looking forward. We need to build a consensus around limitations to abortion, whether it’s six weeks or 15 weeks or 20 weeks. Why shy away from that?”
Trump remains well ahead of every major Republican demographic in the race for the party nomination. He has a roughly 35 percentage-point lead over DeSantis and Ramaswamy among evangelical Christians, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll this week, despite him having been found liable for sexually abusing a New York woman in 1996 and indicted over hush-money payments to an adult film star.
Since early in Trump’s presidency, some evangelicals have likened him to Cyrus the Great, the Persian king who, according to the Bible, enabled Jews to return to Israel from their exile in Babylon. From this perspective, Trump’s own behavior and beliefs are less important than his identity as a vessel of God’s will. Voters say they are choosing a president, not a pastor.
Elaine Beck, 75, a Christian media personality from Tucson, Arizona, said she knows Trump personally and is confident he will pursue the religious right’s goals in a second term: “It has to be God’s way or no way and I believe that God is working in President Trump’s life to help him see that, just like he does you or me or anybody else.”
However, even as they push a hardline agenda, evangelical voters may find their leverage over Republican candidates waning. Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University, wrote on the Politico website that the religious right’s grip on the party is weakening with every election cycle.
Trump can therefore afford some erosion of support among evangelicals, Burge argued: “That’s because Trump’s real base of support in the 2016 primary contest came from a rising group in the GOP whose impact has been largely unnoticed: Republicans who hardly ever darken the door of a church, synagogue or mosque.”
Pence, however, denies that the ground is shifting beneath his feet. He told the Guardian: “No, I really believe that the majority of Republicans cherish faith, cherish freedom, cherish those conservative values.”
“As I travel around Iowa and travel around New Hampshire, the warm reception that we receive from almost everybody affirms to me – as someone who’s been in the conservative movement as an evangelical Christian – that the support for our traditional values is alive and well in the GOP today.”
not OK for them”.
“These are particularly challenging cases, and it is difficult for the university to get to the bottom of whether someone should have known if their partner was still consenting,” she says.
In an attempt to address this earlier, the majority of universities now offer training on sexual consent as part of the packed freshers’ programme of activities and parties. Yet far fewer insist that all students attend.
Allison Havey, co-founder of the Rap (raising awareness and prevention) Project, which runs consent workshops for students, firmly believes they should be mandatory when young people arrive at university. This is something many female students have campaigned for, and which the Office for Students is consulting on.
Havey says: “While men do attend the consent workshops I’ve delivered at universities, they make up 25% to 30% of the audience.”
She wants all students to be taught the law around consent, understanding, for instance, that if a woman is really drunk, she cannot consent to sex and it is rape. And she wants freshers to understand how to be an active bystander, stepping in when something doesn’t feel right.
“We absolutely ask students to have each other’s backs,” she says. “If you are at a party and someone is very drunk or out of it and you see someone leading them into a bedroom, you should say something like: ‘Hey, they’re wasted and can’t say clearly if they consent or not. Why not revisit this tomorrow when they have sobered up?’”
Investigating sexual assault cases, regardless of the details, is rarely an easy task for universities. A student conduct panel will need to decide whether a student has broken the university’s rules by committing “sexual misconduct” and should therefore be suspended or expelled, but with none of the forensic crime facilities the police use and no right to demand anything such as access to phones for evidence.
Any quasi-legal process requires listening to both sides, and Jamdar acknowledges that women who have gone to their university for justice and support can find this very painful.
Hope Conway-Gebbie, who was women’s liberation officer for Edinburgh University students’ union last year, recalls how “deeply upsetting” one female student who she supported found the process.
The student was, she says, initially told by the student disciplinary team that they would be upholding her complaint of rape. However, when she attended the final panel session she was “totally unprepared for what they put her through”.
Conway-Gebbie says: “Her attacker’s parents were wealthy and he had the best legal representation money could buy. He had access to anything submitted on her behalf, such as medical evidence and evidence from her friends.” Meanwhile the female student had no access to any of his information and wasn’t even aware she could have a lawyer.
In the end no sanctions were made, and both students continued to study at the university. The female student bumped into the man she accused in Edinburgh and regularly had to see the friends who defended him.
Conway-Gebbie says this deters others from reaching out. “For every woman who has been failed and retraumatised by this process, there are a dozen who hear this and decide not to put themselves through it. Their assaults then go unreported.”
A spokesperson for Edinburgh University said they could not comment on individual cases, but insisted the safety of students and staff is their priority.
She said: “We do not tolerate sexual violence within our community and we have processes in place to enable us to investigate reports made to us thoroughly and in a supportive way.
“We have a dedicated team who provide specialist advice, support and guidance to those affected by forms of abuse, including guidance on how to contact external organisations, including the police,” she added.
Ellie Wilson, who saw the boyfriend who raped her while she was a student at Glasgow University convicted in court last year, told the Observer that she understood why other female students go to their university instead of the police.
“I was in a fairly unique position because I had a lot of strong evidence, including screenshots of messages where he said he had raped me, and a recorded confession,” she says.
She went to the university first herself, which she describes as “an enormous step” for a victim. “You worry about what the reaction of other people in the university will be. There is huge social pressure, and speaking out against your peers can be really isolating. People take sides,” she says.
Wilson’s boyfriend was suspended by Glasgow after the police arrested him for rape. However, while waiting for the case to come to court he was able to enrol at Edinburgh University. When Wilson heard she was horrified and approached Edinburgh to warn them of the ongoing case, but she was informed that they already knew.
“It was truly appalling,” she remembers. “I was working in Edinburgh and I had thought he was miles away at home in Inverness, but instead he was there and being allowed to make a fresh start, going out drinking and joining the athletics club.”
A spokesperson for Edinburgh University reiterated that they could not comment on individual cases.
Wilson has lodged a petition with the Scottish parliament demanding that universities should be required to declare if someone is being investigated or has been expelled or suspended for sexual assault by another institution.
Kieran McCartan, professor of criminology at UWE, runs a programme which works with male students who are reported for sexual harassment or misogyny, with the aim of making them question their attitudes before their behaviour escalates.
This is not common practice in universities yet, but he hopes it could help to stem the growing tide of sexual violence across the sector.
“The vast majority of young men I’ve worked with in this group start to question their actions by the end,” he says. “You see them realise that their whole life could be derailed because they are making bad decisions.”