Joe Biden has more than an age problem as voters don’t see him as presidential
Many US voters view Joe Biden as failing to fully embody the office of the presidency, despite his legislative and diplomatic achievements.
A US president can fill the role of global statesman, master negotiator with congress, consoler-in-chief during hard times or an entertainer on television.
A challenge for President Joe Biden is that many voters don’t see him as embodying any of these identities, despite his success in notching a range of legislative and diplomatic achievements.
Instead, these voters view Mr Biden as failing to fully inhabit the office of the presidency, putting him at risk of being defined by matters beyond his control, such as the renewed focus on his age.
The president’s advanced years and mental robustness drew fresh attention on Thursday when an investigative report on his handling of classified documents said he displayed “diminished faculties” in interviews and called him an “elderly man with a poor memory”. Mr Biden compounded the matter in reacting publicly to the report, when he referred to Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi as “the president of Mexico”.
Prior presidents have made verbal slips. George W. Bush was known for tortured locutions such as, “They misunderestimated me.” Donald Trump, the Republican presidential front-runner, recently confused former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, his rival for the nomination, with former House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi.
But Mr Biden’s errors have the potential to shape views of him more than prior presidents’ missteps coloured their images, pollsters and analysts say – not just because Mr Biden, at age 81, is the nation’s oldest sitting president, but also because he hasn’t built an image as a strong leader or created an emotional bond with voters.
“It’s a huge problem,” said Rich Thau, of the nonpartisan message-testing company Engagious, who runs focus groups of voters who backed Mr Trump in 2016 but abandoned him in 2020. “I have multiple people in every focus group who will mention that they don’t think the president has all of his faculties.”
Mr Biden can point to many accomplishments, such as navigating major spending on infrastructure, semiconductor plants and green-energy programs through a divided congress. He has led Western nations in countering Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and has visited that war zone, taking a 10-hour train ride to Kyiv. He flew to Israel shortly after the October 7 Hamas attacks touched off war and other skirmishes in the region.
Yet when asked, voters often can’t name any of Mr Biden’s accomplishments. Worse, says Mr Thau, the swing voters he talks with often repeat conspiratorial ideas about the president’s leadership.
“A component to the age thing that I hear in focus groups is that he’s not really the one in charge, that other folks in the administration or congress are pulling the strings,” he said.
William Mallon, 45, an electrician from Tucson, Arizona, voted for Mr Biden in 2020 and hasn’t ruled out supporting him again. Mr Mallon said Biden has “done a decent job with the presidency,” such as helping the country move on from the Covid pandemic. But he said the president’s acuity weighs on his decision.
“You have to have good cognitive skills to hold the highest position in the land, one of the most powerful positions in the world,” he said. “I don’t want to be an ageist or anything like that, but it seems like his mental capacity is in decline.”
Mr Biden’s age is also entwined in voters’ minds with their economic dissatisfaction, said Gunner Ramer, political director of the Republican Accountability PAC, an anti-Trump group that talks often with swing voters.
These voters are frustrated with the state of the country, particularly with the recent spate of high inflation, but they don’t feel that the president is competent to steer the nation into better times.
“There is deep frustration with the economy, and they want to support someone they can have a favourable opinion of, who can get things done. And for a lot of swing voters, that isn’t Joe Biden,’’ said Mr Ramer, who added that many of these voters also have reservations about backing Mr Trump.
Voters doubted Mr Biden’s capabilities even before his latest gaffes. Asked to compare the two likely major-party nominees for the White House this year, only 14 per cent said Mr Biden had the most physical stamina to be president, while 48 per cent picked Mr Trump, a Wall Street Journal poll found in December. Only 29 per cent said Mr Biden was more fit mentally to serve as president, compared with 45 per cent who picked Mr Trump.
Mr Biden on Thursday challenged the idea that his cognitive skills are fading and reacted angrily to claims of a faulty memory made by a special counsel looking into how classified documents wound up in his personal possession. “My memory is fine. Take a look at what I’ve done since I’ve become president,” he said.
The investigation by Robert Hur, a former US attorney (prosecutor) from Maryland during the Trump administration, said that no criminal charges were warranted against Mr Biden but assessed that he was careless in holding on to classified documents from when he was vice-president.
In contrast with Mr Biden, Mr Trump has built a more solid connection with his supporters. Trump voters, far more than Biden backers, say their vote is more a sign of support for their candidate than it is a signal of opposition to the rival party, Journal polling finds.
That kind of bond has helped Mr Trump retain his support despite facing criminal charges, just as it helped another president of advanced age, Ronald Reagan, remain popular despite gaffes such as joking that the US was about to bomb Russia.
Voters have come to expect to form a bond with their president. Mr Biden, by some measures, has been less visible than others who held his office. He has conducted fewer news conferences than his five predecessors – some 33, compared with 54 by Mr Trump and 65 by Barack Obama at this point in their presidencies, according to records, tracked by Martha Joynt Kumar of Towson University, that run through January 20.
Mr Biden has also conducted far fewer media interviews than other recent presidents, though he talks informally more often with reporters, according to Ms Kumar’s records.
It was Teddy Roosevelt who created the expectation that presidents would become fixtures of public debate and popular culture. He used the powers of the White House to press congress to push back on business practices by passing antitrust laws and worker protections. He referred to the platform his office gave him as a “bully pulpit”, a sign of the importance Roosevelt placed on communicating with voters to advance his policy goals.
Roosevelt was a master of creating splashy moments irresistible to newspapers, the mass media of the time, at one point taking a submarine to the bottom of Long Island Sound to build support for the navy’s new underwater technology.
“Presidents didn’t used to do that,” said David Greenberg, a Rutgers University history professor who has written about how presidents create a public image. “Their speeches were ceremonial, like on Fourth of July. They weren’t, ‘Here’s my agenda.’”
In later decades, the idea of a “personal presidency” – a president who might be an intimate, consoler or entertainer, as well as a leader – took firmer hold. It was cemented by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s fireside radio chats, John F. Kennedy’s bantering news conferences and stylish persona, and Ronald Reagan’s humour. As a candidate, Bill Clinton played the saxophone on late-night TV, and Richard Nixon, between his presidential campaigns, played piano on television.
“Being visible has become part of the expectation of the job, and so a president who is very good behind the scenes, dealing with foreign leaders, dealing with his own aides in thinking through policy and diplomacy, even in dealing with congress – those skills are equally important, but they may not be sufficient to convey the picture of complete mastery,” said Mr Greenberg, who said he believed that Mr Biden has built a record of competence.
Some analysts say that building a forceful public persona has been a challenge for Mr Biden, in part because his proposition in 2020 was to return the nation to normalcy after four years of a continually present Mr Trump, who commanded public attention – and jolted the nerves of his adversaries – through provocative statements and constant posts on Twitter, now known as X.
Mr Biden “deliberately held back and wasn’t pushing himself in front of the American people on an hour-to-hour basis”, said Mr Thau. “And I think that initially served him well. People wanted the break.”
Now, however, voters tell Mr Thau that they feel Mr Biden is absent. “They say, ‘I don’t know what he’s doing. What is he up to?’” he said. “And when I ask in focus groups to name one accomplishment, a large number of people can’t name a single thing he’s done in his first two years as president. The narrative from the White House never penetrated their news feed.”
Chet Mooney, 23, a student from Tucson, Arizona, and his wife, Amanda Allen, 24, an ultrasound technician, said they have seen videos on Instagram of Mr Biden reading off cards and worry that this shows he isn’t in control. Ms Allen and Mr Mooney are deciding between Trump and independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in this year’s election.
“I really don’t know how much he’s running this country, just based off of what I’ve seen and how he speaks in public,” Ms Allen said.
Eliza Collins contributed to this article.
The Wall Street Journal
