Are we past Joe Biden’s bedtime?
The sight of the US President deteriorating highlights the conversation that Democrats refuse to have: would the country be better off if he stepped aside to allow a younger contender to run?
It is the conversation the Democrats refuse to have but must have, says Joe Klein, author of the seminal American political novel Primary Colors.
Klein was flicking through television channels early this month when he saw Joe Biden giving a press conference in Florida.
“It was shocking, and sad,” he recently wrote about Biden in his Sanity Clause newsletter. “He seemed so old. His eyes were slits, he turned the pages of his very well-prepared remarks haltingly. He slurred his words slightly. His physical condition overwhelmed the message.”
The sight of their almost 81-year old President deteriorating in front of the nation is causing alarm to Americans across the political spectrum, and also to US allies around the world. The fact Biden is slowly losing his cognitive abilities is not breaking news but a confluence of events during the past two weeks has put the issue in the spotlight like never before.
It has made pundits from all sides of politics, including Klein, ask whether the Democrats and the country would be better off if Biden stepped aside in the next few months to allow a younger Democrat contender to run for president next year.
“Biden is a ghost of what the country needs right now,’ writes Klein. “We need to transition to something, a new Democratic vision of America or to someone who can plausibly promise a creative way out of this molasses statis. But Democrats are paralysed.”
They certainly are. There is no comfortable place for the party as it watches Biden age faster than even his most ardent supporters expected just 2½ years into what could be an eight-year presidency.
Biden’s five-day Asian trip this week to the G20 summit in India and to Vietnam generated headlines that focused as much on his bizarre press conference in Hanoi as on his diplomatic achievements.
During that presser, an exhausted-looking Biden tried to make a tortured point about climate deniers, saying: “And there’s a – my – my brother loves havin’ – there’s famous lines from movies that he always quotes. You know, it – and – one of the – is – the – there’s a movie about John Wayne. He’s an Indian scout. And they’re trying to get the Ap … I think it was the Apache … one … one of the great tribes of America back on the reservation. And the Indian scout … the Indian looks at John Wayne and points to the Union soldier and says, ‘He’s a lying, dog-faced pony soldier’ … Well, there’s a lot of lying, dog-faced pony soldiers out there about global warming.” It was excruciating to watch.
Shortly afterwards Biden’s press secretary chose to wrap up the press conference while the President was still talking, cutting his mic as music began to play, signalling it was time for him to leave the stage.
Even the left-leaning New York Times could not resist a pot-shot at Biden, saying how the trip had exacerbated questions about his age and headlining its story: “ ‘It is evening, isn’t it?’ An 80-year-old President’s whirlwind trip”.
Some of the President’s supporters have tried to play down the issue of Biden’s cognitive decline, saying it’s a topic that is being pushed and exaggerated by conservative US media to undermine him. But a slew of new and disturbing polls show that rising concern about Biden’s age is spread across the political spectrum.
A recent poll by The Wall St Journal found that 73 per cent of Americans believe the President is too old to seek a second term in the White House, but also two-thirds of Democrats believe he should not serve a second term.
These are stunningly high figures and they have been consistent across polls with a CNN poll showing three-quarters of Americans are seriously concerned that Biden’s age is affecting his mental competence.
An Associated Press-NORC poll found 77 per cent of people across all age groups said Biden was too old to be effective for four more years. This included 89 per cent of Republicans but – telling – also 69 per cent of Democrats.
It comes amid a broader political debate in Washington about how old is too old when it comes to politicians.
Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, 81, has twice frozen while giving press conferences this year, raising speculation about his health and his future. The oldest US senator, Democrat Dianne Feinstein, 90, has been away for almost three months this year with shingles and recently was hospitalised after a fall. Alongside them in the Senate are Republican Chuck Grassley, who turns 90 on Sunday; independent Bernie Sanders, who celebrated his 82nd birthday last week; Republican James Risch, who turned 80 in May; and at least six more senators in their late 70s. Former Democratic house Speaker Nancy Pelosi is 83.
But being too old for the presidency is a different proposition than being in congress. Before Biden, the previous oldest president was Ronald Reagan, who was just shy of 78 when he left office after serving two terms. By contrast Biden will be 82 if he is inaugurated for a second term and 86 by the time he leaves office.
Reagan’s age was a topic of conversation during his presidency but, unlike Biden, Reagan was mostly able to disarm his critics, famously quipping about his opponent Walter Mondale in 1984: “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.”
But Reagan was also a much more vigorous and charismatic personality who could hide his years more effectively than Biden.
In March 1987, during Reagan’s eighth and final year in office, only 40 per cent of Americans thought he was too old to serve as president. Almost double that number think Biden is too old and he is just more than halfway through his first term.
Biden’s problem is that he is an old 80. He is only three years older than his likely opponent, Donald Trump, yet Trump, for all of his faults, is a vigorous 77 and is rarely viewed as being too old.
In contrast, Biden frequently misreads teleprompters, reading out words like “applause” or “exit left” and wandering off stage without warning, as he did during a Medal of Honour ceremony at the White House early this month.
In September last year, at a White House conference on combating hunger, Biden even called out for a congresswoman in the crowd, Jackie Walorski, forgetting she had died in a car crash a month earlier – a death Biden had commented on at the time.
A new book on the Bidden administration by journalist Franklin Foer suggests Biden is aware of these failings but is hostile to efforts by his staff to micromanage his behaviour. Foer’s book, The Last Politician, is one of the first insider accounts of the Biden White House. Foer writes that in private Biden admits he feels tired but he complains when staff try to clean up his gaffes. In Poland last year Biden mistakenly implied that Russian President Vladmir Putin would have to be removed from power. When his aides later clarified publicly that the US was not calling for regime change in Russia, Biden was furious.
“Rather than owning his failure, he fumed to his friends about how he was treated like a toddler. Was John Kennedy ever babied like that?” Foer writes.
When asked whether he believes Biden will run again next year, Foer cautiously says yes. He says it would be surprising if Biden did not run, but he adds that it would also not be a ‘total shock.’
Biden maintains that he is running and the prevailing narrative from Democrats has been that Biden beat his most likely opponent for 2024, Trump, in 2020, and is therefore the best placed person to defeat him again. But this narrative, which has been held forth by Democrats throughout Biden’s presidency, is increasingly being challenged by the speed of his physical decline.
Some Democrats are asking whether age is a contributing factor in his inability to sell his presidency or his achievements to American voters. Despite falling inflation, a growing economy and a series of substantial legislative wins in his first two years, Biden cannot persuade Americans that his record is a laudable one or even a passable one. Real incomes are still a long way short of recovering from the damage caused by inflation during the past two years and cost-of-living pressures are palpable across the country.
No matter what he does, Biden cannot shake out of his constantly low approval ratings, which have been hovering in the low 40 per cent range for all of this year. “It’s sad to watch him now, past his sell-by date,” writes Klein. “His campaign seems creaky, contrived – this whole lame Bidenomics pitch is an apt metaphor. Old Joe was out on Labor Day, trying to be enthusiastic, touting his economic record, shouting ‘Jobs,’ while the public was moaning ‘Prices!’ ”
Despite what commentators like Klein may want, there appears no prospect that Democrats will ask Biden not to run for a second term. That decision, they maintain, would have to be made by Biden himself.
No serious Democratic contender will run against him, fearful that they would be seen as a wrecker in the same way Ted Kennedy was viewed when he ran against Jimmy Carter in the primaries in 1980, only to contribute to Reagan’s victory.
If Biden chooses to run he will have no effective opposition, with only self-help author Marianne Williamson and anti-vax conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr so far choosing to run against him.
But the attraction for Democrats of Biden choosing not to run next year is growing. Biden could shuffle off into history as something of a Democrat hero having denied Trump a second term in office, performed better than expected in the midterm elections, passed a series of progressive laws and reforms, and ended US military involvement in Afghanistan.
He would be seen as the necessary transitional president who then handed over to a younger successor to take on Trump, saving the US from a tragic choice between a decaying president and an accused felon.
The trouble is that Biden, at least publicly, does not give any hint that he is considering stepping aside next year. Yet the clock is ticking and, with the presidential primary season beginning in January, Biden would need to announce his intention not to contest no later than the end of this year.
Behind the scenes, his likely successors would be quietly honing their policies and campaigns, ready to swing into battle at short notice if Biden does choose to fall on his sword in the coming months.
The list of likely candidates in this situation would be long, but most likely headed by Vice-President Kamala Harris, California Governor Gavin Newsom, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
Harris would be the best known frontrunner but probably the least likely to secure the nomination. She is widely seen as an ineffectual Vice-President and, if 2020 is any guide, she is a poor campaigner.
Harris, 58, is viewed very differently in different parts of the country. In Democrat cities she is lauded for the fact she is a progressive Californian black woman and the first woman of South Asian descent to become Vice-President. But in the midwest heartland where the election will be won, she is strikingly unpopular and is seen by many in rural areas as a woke outsider who cannot relate to their values.
Probably the early favourite in any Democrat contest would be Newsom, 55, the square-jawed Governor from central casting whose behaviour suggests he has ambitions beyond California.
The third prominent candidate would be Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who, at just 41, is carving out a big reputation in Washington. He was one of the most impressive of the Democrat campaigners in 2020 and is now well known on the national stage.
Then there are others who may choose to run, including Michigan’s Whitmer, Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar, veteran Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren and even the young progressive congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.
But none of these will jump into the ring unless Biden chooses to depart of his own free will. And that is the conversation that the Democrats refuse to have.
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