Biden's age is a concern. But we don't need to abandon all logic.
Let's take a breath and break down the issues.
Thursday’s debate has given us a lot to talk about. There were questions about the future of abortion policy after Dobbs. There were questions – and dodged answers – about whether Trump will accept the election results. There was even a brief discussion of Trump’s felony convictions. But the main topic of discussion was Biden’s performance and delivery. Some of this was substantive – he appeared to get confused mid-answer to a question about abortion and veer into something about immigration. But the main problem was a raspy voice and a delivery that lacked force or the kind of intonation that we expect in these kinds of events.
For people watching the debate, it was hard not to feel a sense of dread about Biden. As a seventeen-year teaching veteran who has turned in some poor performances (including with a cold, on cold medicine, and unknowingly having COVID), it was deeply painful to watch. The extent to which it was bad political theater is not a media creation.
But the decision to focus on Biden’s age is a choice. It’s a choice that seems to have short-circuited reasonable conversations about what exactly it is we are worried about, and why age matters in politics. My efforts to ask people these questions have generally been met with some version of “OLD OLD OLD” and I assure you I get how numbers work. Biden’s age, however, has started to seem of a piece with conversations we like to have in euphemism – those about gender, about race, about sexuality, about physical ability – as they relate to presidential politics.
What you do at home is between you and the New York Times editorial page. I think those of us in the writing and commenting business owe our audiences better and more nuanced discussions. So here’s my attempt to work through some of the ways that Biden’s age might matter.
Representation
One of the more substantive critiques is that it’s tough for a political class increasingly composed of people over the age of seventy to grasp modern problems. There’s something to descriptive representation, and it makes sense to have people in political power who represent a broad range of identities. (Something the American political system has objectively sucked at thus far.) It’s definitely important to think about the constraints on who can realistically win public office, and also to think about how different constituencies communicate their needs to elected officials. It’s also important for administrations to hire people with deep expertise in areas like technology, and not rely on whether the person in the White House is a “digital native” or whatever.
The representation argument also breaks down in a few ways. One is that if it’s younger millennials and Gen Z making the charge, it’s not clear that, say, Harris (60) or even a candidate in their mid-forties like Josh Shapiro or Gretchen Whitmer, would be a more effective conduit for those concerns. This is related to the larger issue with descriptive representation and the presidency: even when you add in the vice presidency, there’s only so many groups that can be represented by a couple of people. Applying too much of a descriptive lens to the presidency highlights what will ultimately be zero-sum conflict between groups, straining an already fractious coalition.
Governing capacity
One meaning of the phrase “up to the job” implies that at Biden’s age, he might not have the stamina to keep a presidential schedule, travel or meet with foreign leaders, or make sound decisions.
This is hardly the first time that presidential incapacity has come up in US history. If the president dies, what happens next is one of the few clear things in Article II. It’s important, in that case, to have a capable and qualified vice president. Which we have.
The scenario in which the president is alive but incapacitated is a lot more complicated, and not always abstract. Woodrow Wilson had a stroke, with a year and a half to go in his second term. Probably his wife was running things. There are debates about whether Ronald Reagan was appreciably affected by Alzheimer’s while still in office. It’s a serious issue, and the 25th amendment doesn’t clarify things as much as it should. But the best way we have to assess a presidential administration in real time is its output, and we get a pretty minimal portrait of management chaos from this one. We don’t hear about staffing instability, lack of clarity over who’s in charge, half-baked executive orders, or other things that indicate that management of the executive branch is faltering. Obviously, not everyone is going to agree with every decision it makes – I certainly don’t – and we may learn something different later on. But for 2024, the question is which candidate we think will run a smooth and competent executive branch – and what policy goals it will pursue.
Electability
Let’s face it, this is really it. And what an ouroboros this electability thing has become. This was the main argument for Biden in 2020, paired with equally wishful dreams that he would either gracefully step aside in 2024 or age in reverse. In 2024, if we take electability on its own, separate from the previous 2 questions, it becomes the ultimate in focusing on the “odds” rather than the “stakes,” in Jay Rosen’s formulation. In other words, it becomes part of horserace coverage that offers little in the way of substance about issues that people care about.
Certainly, candidate traits and campaign skill play a role in how the electorate reacts to them, and how messages about past performance and plans for the future are delivered and received. But it has so many problematic dimensions: it’s founded in demographic perceptions, and suggests an ever-narrowing set of criteria for president even as the country becomes more diverse and complex. It builds on an interpretation of the 2016 election that attributes electoral magic to Donald Trump, an unpopular politician who has never commanded an electoral majority.
This superficial and candidate-centric view is easily blasted by a pundit class that appears to be huffing paint from old JFK portraits while tearfully watching videos of Reagan’s Challenger speech. It’s true that in the era of mass media, candidates who are smooth talkers, conventionally attractive, and look like politicians of the past have advantages on candidates who don’t fit those criteria. But it’s … something for mass media to stress this mediated version of what it means to be electable as if it were inevitable, and not the result of decisions to elevate particular traits.
This all could be just silly if it didn’t obscure so many more important questions. Framing politics in terms of who looked “electable” or “strong” pushes out crucial questions of how different candidates approach power, what their administrations would do, or what might be done in the course of each campaign in order to link them to specific constituencies. The word “electability” reduces the electorate to a passive audience incapable of making serious political decisions.
I know a lot of people believe that. But if people writing about politics believe it, then it’s pretty difficult for us to commit to the task of asking questions that hold power to account and empower citizens.
The critiques and questions related to Biden’s age are not irrelevant, nor entirely superficial. But we owe it to the larger project of democracy not to muddle them, and to keep focused on what really matters.
Completely agree that focusing on how a candidate comes across in a single debate is pretty irrelevant to the job they will do, and appreciate you breaking the "old" issue into three "real" questions about the ability to govern.
That said, it seems that there is a fourth "real" issue: whether age interferes with his ability to react in a crisis. While this is overblown (recalling absurd questions about whether Hillary could react to the 3am call), but it is a real concern in this nuclear age, where potentially life ending decisions need to be made under extreme pressure, sometimes in the middle of the night. This won't happen often, and hopefully will not happen at all, but if it does, the stakes will be literally life and death for human life on the planet. And unlike almost everything a President does, this is a duty that can't be delegated or workshopped by the experts the President surrounds himself with.
Therefore, I think it is quite reasonable to want to ensure that the President has sufficient mental acuity to decide whether to launch nuclear missiles. That said, of course it is of equal, or probably greater, importance that we have assurance that the President will make the RIGHT decision. And there, I don't trust Trump AT ALL.