Joe Biden won’t budge but he’s becoming a liability

There has never been a US president this old although Joe Biden’s odds of dying in the next half decade are likely much lower than the average 82yo’s. Picture: AFP

Between them, Dylan Thomas and John McCain may have best captured Joe Biden’s state of mind as he defies the doubters and plans his octogenarian run for president.

We can’t know Biden’s interior motivation but suiting up for another presidential campaign seems, in part at least, his way of heeding the poet’s plea not to go gentle into that good night. McCain, more prosaically and basing his words on a saying of his friend Mo Udall, may have framed it better when he stated “the only known cure for presidential ambition is embalming fluid”.

There is a surreal quality to contemporary American presidential politics. As things stand we remain locked on course for a grotesque repeat contest next year between a man who might well be a convicted felon by election day, and a man most voters think, with reason, is cognitively unable to meet the demands of the office.

The choice on offer for the world’s most powerful country: the Unspeakable versus the Incapable.

Republican voters still have a chance to avert their half of that calamity if they choose. For Democrats the challenge is different: as with all incumbents the choice is largely Biden’s. But the pressure on him to withdraw is mounting. Polling data, lukewarm support from aides and even advice from friends are all leaning on him.

There has never been a president this old. Official US government actuarial tables say that at 82 (his age when Biden would take office for a second term) there’s a slightly greater than 50 per cent chance that a man will die in the next four years – which makes a vote for Biden next year literally a coin toss between him and his manifestly awful running mate.

Polling suggests the public is more pessimistic: a CBS poll last weekend found only a third believed Biden would finish a second term, foreshortened by either his demise or resignation. Last week, David Ignatius, a Washington Post columnist supposedly admired by the president, made waves with a fairly brutal column urging Biden to step aside. “Mr President, maybe this is that moment when duty has been served,” he wrote.

Is all this morbid musing fair? Perhaps not. For one thing Biden’s odds of avoiding the reaper in the next half decade must be much better than the average 82-year-old’s. He seems physically in good shape and doubtless gets the best medical monitoring and treatment available to anyone in the world. (And if it’s any consolation, those actuarial tables are a fine example of Zeno’s paradox: though your probability of dying increases each year, it is of course never 100 per cent, even if you live to be older than anyone who’s ever lived.)

What’s more, the word from those close to him is that he’s up to the task. I spoke with a prominent and reliably honest senior Democratic figure this week who told me that he had seen Biden over the summer in small social settings and that he was, if not exactly razor-sharp, then certainly not the gibbering dementia patient he’s portrayed to be – though claims by the 49-year-old press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre that she “can’t keep up” with the 80-year-old president do smack a little of protesting too much.

The problem with all this is that it requires people to believe that the Biden they see on their screens every day – mumbling, stumbling, falling off a bike, uttering baffling circumlocutions, drifting off to sleep – is not the real Joe Biden. Somehow, we are to think that the minute the cameras turn off, the real man emerges: alert, assertive, probing staff and visitors alike with detailed questions, performing prodigious feats of memory, bench-pressing 100lb weights in the White House gym.

Even if it were true it scarcely matters politically: it is an inescapable reality of electoral politics that voters give a verdict on the flawed man they see, not the avatar of mental and intellectual strength that supposedly exists behind the scenes.

Behind the renewed focus on Biden’s age is a new political reality. For the past few years it has been an article of faith among Democrats that Biden is best placed to beat Donald Trump. He did it once and they believe, with the same choice on offer and now even more evidence of Trump’s vices, that voters would surely pick him again.

But the polls now suggest otherwise. The escalating scandals over the business dealings and legal challenges of his son, Hunter, are beginning to hurt the president, limiting his ability to put clear moral ground between himself and Donald Trump. With inflation stubbornly high and interest rates biting, Biden gets low marks from the public for his handling of the economy. The illegal immigration crisis that now grips cities like New York is laying bare the administration’s abject failure to deal with the porous border.

All this, and voters are asked to choose a man they think is simply not up to the job. But you’d be unwise to think Biden won’t run again. In the last century only one president, Calvin Coolidge, freely chose, without a nudge from the voters, not to seek a second full term.

“The presidential office takes a heavy toll of those who occupy it and those who are dear to them,” Coolidge later wrote.

“While we should not refuse to spend and be spent in the service of our country, it is hazardous to attempt what we feel is beyond our strength to accomplish.”

He was just 56 at the time, yet was dead, as it happens, before he would have completed a second term. The only other presidents who turned down a second presidential run – Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson – did so after suffering primary election setbacks.

So in the absence of such a stumble – an unlikely outcome – it seems that only the embalming fluid will keep Biden from raging, raging against the dying of the light.

The Times