We’re approaching the end of year three of the Biden presidency, and time is not on the side of Biden or the administration.
Back in June 2022, former Obama strategist David Axelrod acknowledged the obvious, that Biden was the oldest president in U.S. history, and winning and serving another term would be a major challenge: “The presidency is a monstrously taxing job and the stark reality is the president would be closer to 90 than 80 at the end of a second term, and that would be a major issue,” Axelrod said.
About a week later, Mark Leibovich of The Atlantic came out and put it even more directly:
Let me put this bluntly: Joe Biden should not run for reelection in 2024. He is too old.
Biden will turn 80 on November 20. He will be 82 if and when he begins a second term. The numbers just keep getting more ridiculous from there. “It’s not the 82 that’s the problem. It’s the 86,” one swing voter said in a recent focus group, referring to the hypothetical age Biden would be at the end of that (very) hypothetical second term.
Then in April of this year, the editors of the New York Times editorial page came right up to the line of arguing that Biden shouldn’t run.
The usual White House method of demonstrating a president’s mastery is to take tough questions in front of cameras, but Mr. Biden has not taken advantage of that opportunity, as The Times reported on Friday. He has held fewer news conferences and media interviews than most of his modern predecessors.
…If he runs again, Mr. Biden will need to provide explicit reassurance to voters; many of them have seen family members decline rapidly in their 80s. Americans are watching what Mr. Biden says and does, just as he has asked them to do.
This week, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius wrote a column arguing Biden – and Kamala Harris! — should not run for reelection. This stands out because Ignatius is not a bomb-thrower, a table-pounder, or someone who throws out hot takes for the sake of getting attention. If Ignatius is making this argument… it’s because he actually believes it.
Biden and his team no doubt wanted to dispel the concerns about the president’s age as quickly as possible. The way that an elderly president would normally dispel these concerns would be to go out and do what people say he can’t or isn’t doing anymore: do more sit-down on-camera interviews, hold more press conferences, do early morning and evening events, and maintain a busy schedule to demonstrate that even if Biden is old, he’s energetic for his age.
Another way to help defuse the age issue is to be honest about the small changes that have to be made as concessions to the president’s advanced age. The president now usually uses the shorter front stairway on Air Force One instead of the regular one. The president rarely has any public events the day after he returns from an overseas trip. If the White House openly discussed the small changes that are needed for an octogenarian president, there would be less worry that there are other, more significant changes that the White House is hiding.
But Biden hasn’t done more morning or evening events, and he hasn’t done more sit-down interviews or press conferences, even though it is in his political interest to do so. So we can reasonably conclude that Biden isn’t choosing to not to these things, it’s that he can’t do these things – or at least he can’t do them without bad results.
What’s more, when in front of the cameras, Biden continues to say things like he’s just following orders from his staff, declaring at the end of a press conference that he’s going to go to bed, bringing back the odd “lying, dog-faced pony soldier” quote, claiming he visited Ground Zero the day after the attacks, and so on. Almost every Biden statement is followed by the White House staff clarifying what the president meant to say.
Yet the White House is trying to argue the age question is silly, or agist, or somehow illegitimate. Biden communications team staffers are criticizing reporters for being “fixated” on the president’s age. Hey, pal, when the president is nearly three years older than Ronald Reagan was when he left office, people are going to be talking about the president’s age! When Bob Dole ran in 1996, he was widely considered too old for the presidency at age 73. Biden turns 81 in November.
Among all the people who need to be reassured about Biden’s age, columnists like Ignatius would appear to be the lowest-hanging fruit. Everyone has known from day one that the perception that Biden was too darn old to serve another four years was going to be one of the most significant challenges to Biden’s reelection campaign. We’re approaching the end of year three of the Biden presidency, and time is not on the side of Biden or the administration.