People of their 80s lead countries, create majestic art and perform feats of endurance. One entered the record books for scaling Mount Everest. It’s soon time for Joe Biden, 80 on Sunday, to come to a decision whether he has another mountain to climb — the one to a second term as president.
Questions swirl now, in his own party in addition to broadly within the country, about whether he’s got what it takes to go for the summit again.
The oldest president in U.S. history, Biden hits his milestone birthday at a private crossroads as he and his family face a call in the approaching months on whether he should announce for reelection. He’d be 86 at the tip of a possible second term.
Biden aides and allies all say he intends to run — and his team has begun quiet preparations for a campaign — nevertheless it has often been the president himself who has sounded essentially the most equivocal. “My intention is that I run again,” he said at a news conference this month. “But I’m a fantastic respecter of fate.”
“We will have discussions about it,” he said. Aides expect those conversations to choose up in earnest over Thanksgiving and Christmas, with a call not until well after Latest Yr’s.
Biden planned to have a good time his birthday at a family brunch within the White House on Sunday.
To look at Biden at work is to see a pacesetter tap a storehouse of data built up over a half century in public office as he draws on deep personal relationships at home and abroad, his mastery of policy and his familiarity with how Washington works or doesn’t. Briefly, the wisdom of the aged.
“There’s something to be said for experience,” said Dartmouth College historian Matt Delmont as he noted the handfuls of world leaders of their 80s.
But to watch Biden can also be to see him walk now often with a halting gait, in contrast to his trotting on stage on election night 2020.
It’s to see him take a pass on a proper dinner with other world leaders with out a real explanation, as happened on his trip abroad this past week, when he twice spoke of visiting Colombia when he meant Cambodia. Some supporters wince when he speaks, hoping he gets through his remarks OK.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision, at age 82, to tug back from leadership and let a latest generation rise may spill over into Biden’s pondering and that of his party as Democrats weigh whether or not they need to go along with a proven winner or turn to the energy of youth.
Among the many questions Pelosi’s move raises, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, an authority on political communications on the University of Pennsylvania: “Even when one is extremely competent and successful, is there a degree at which one should step aside to present others the chance to steer just as others stepped aside to make it possible so that you can accomplish that?
“Pelosi’s decision makes such questions more salient within the context of Biden’s 2020 statement that he was the bridge to a latest generation of leaders.”
Biden’s verbal flubs have been the stuff of legend throughout his five-decade political profession, so sussing out the impact of age on his acuity is a guessing game for “armchair gerontologists,” as Dr. S. Jay Olshansky, an aging expert, puts it.
Within the distorted mirrors of social media commentary, every slip is magnified into supposed proof of senility. A moment of silent reflection by Biden in a gathering is presented because the president nodding off. All of that went into Donald Trump’s quiver of falsehoods when he announced Tuesday he’ll seek the presidency again.
Some allies see Biden’s blunders as an increasing vulnerability within the eyes of voters as he’s grown older.
In an AP VoteCast survey of the electorate this month, fully 58% of voters said he doesn’t have the mental capability to serve effectively as president. That was a grim picture of his standing now, not only looking forward to one other potential term. Only 34% said he’s a robust leader.
Those findings come alongside notably low approval rankings in league with Trump’s at this point of their presidencies.
Two months before the 2020 election, Olshansky, on the University of Illinois, Chicago, published a paper that predicted each Biden and Trump were sure to keep up their good health beyond the tip of this presidential term.
Based on a scientific team’s evaluation of obtainable medical records, family history and other information, the paper further concluded that each men are probably “super-agers,” a subgroup of people that maintain their mental and physical functioning and are inclined to live longer than the common person their age.
Nothing has modified Olshansky’s mind about either of them.
“While President Biden may chronologically be 80 years old, biologically he probably is not,” he said. “And biological age is much more essential than chronological age.” He calls Biden a “classic example of all the things that is good about aging … and so his age, I believe, needs to be almost completely irrelevant.”
Biden is already within the club of high achievers for people his age. Unlike 92% of individuals 75 and over within the U.S., he still has a job, not to say a mightily demanding one.
And he’s been on a roll. The November elections produced the perfect result for a Democratic president’s party in midterms in many years — despite the poison pill of high inflation — as Democrats kept control of the Senate, narrowly lost the House in defiance of expectations of a rout, and won several competitive governors’ races in key states.
The president also sealed a string of consequential legislative victories in recent months, on climate, infrastructure, health care expansion, military aid to Ukraine and more.
Biden says he begins most days with an 8 a.m. workout, when he is generally joined by his personal trainer and physical therapist, Drew Contreras, if he doesn’t ride his Peloton bike.
“If I let it go for per week, I feel it,” he told the “Smartless” podcast recently. “I used to give you the option to go for per week and nothing would change.”
White House aides say Biden reads his briefing book deep into the night, holds intensive evening meetings with advisers and has never balked at their scheduling requests which will have him out late, though rarely up early.
Yet his aides are deeply protective of the president, especially along with his public schedule, which is lighter than those of Barack Obama and George W. Bush, each far younger in office. They’ve shielded him from formal interviews and, until recently, press conferences.
To his doubters, he says: “Watch me.”
Biden has been diagnosed with several quite common age-related health conditions, none causing him serious problems.
In his November 2021 summary of Biden’s health after the president’s first full physical in office, Dr. Kevin O’Connor noted Biden’s gait had grow to be somewhat stiffer, something doctors look ahead to in older patients because it could signal a fall risk.
But after testing, the doctor concluded it’s mostly on account of ongoing “wear and tear” arthritis of the spine, in addition to compensation for a broken foot sustained a yr earlier and the event of “mild peripheral neuropathy” or subtle damage to some sensory nerves within the feet.
Experts say age shouldn’t be destiny; what matters is sweet health, fitness and functioning. Japanese climber Yuichiro Miura had enough of those attributes to make it to the highest of Mount Everest in 2013 at age 80, setting a record that an 85-year-old Nepali man died attempting to break in 2017.
Growing old is inexorable — at whatever pace, it comes.
It got here at one pace for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, for instance, and it’s coming at one other for Pelosi, who’s one other institution on the town.
“What’s incorrect with me?” Marshall asked upon his decision to retire from the Supreme Court at age 82, before answering: “I’m old. I’m getting old and coming apart.” (He died two years later.)
At the identical age, Pelosi buzzes Capitol hallways in high heels, outpacing much younger people. And her cognitive abilities have never been in query.
The knock against her was that she blocked the very best ambitions of generations of younger lawmakers before her decision this past week not to hunt reelection as House Democratic leader when Republicans take control.
Supreme Court justices, shielded from the electorate and managers, can grow as old within the job as they need and as fate allows — and they have a tendency to stay around. Justice John Paul Stevens retired in 2010 at age 90, attributing his decision to a small stroke while reading his Residents United dissent from the bench.
Ruth Bader Ginsberg, a hugely consequential 80-something, fell three years wanting her goal to be as old as Stevens on the bench. She died in September 2020.
In democracies, where voters are the boss, and in autocracies, where they are not, plenty of individuals in power soldier on of their advanced years, even when few are up there like former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who became the world’s oldest leader at 92 and is running to get the office back, at 97.
Much of the leadership within the U.S. Congress is over 70, especially Democrats, and so were Biden’s major rivals within the 2020 Democratic primaries and Trump.
Attribute that, partially, to increasing longevity.
“Life expectancy back around 1900 in the US was about 50,” Olshansky said, “and we added about 30 years” since.
In Cockeysville, Maryland, outside Baltimore, Nelson Hyman, 85, and his wife, Roz Hyman, 77, credit Biden with getting big things right and particularly with appointing a robust team. To those Democrats, that adds as much as an efficient presidency that taps the worth of age in a society that usually doesn’t.
“I’ve at all times felt the president is nearly as good because the people who he appoints, and I believe he’s appointed some very, superb people, very competent people, and he uses them,” said Roz, a retired counselor in a psychiatric hospital.
“Now, are you going to ask me, is he going to be competent in two years? Who knows? I do not know.”
A president can only be conceptual, said Nelson, retired from an insurance profession, “and the detail people will care for the main points.” When Russia’s Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, he said, Biden stepped up, “spoke beautifully and strongly” and “has not been afraid to cope with Putin. By no means.”
They recalled seeing Ronald Reagan struggle in his second term, before he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s after he left office, and felt that he, too, had surrounded himself with competence, as much as they disagreed along with his direction.
Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, said Reagan posted major achievements even when his memory could have been slipping, partially because his aides were strong and completed and Reagan retained the values that informed his judgments.
That is true of many presidents, Biden included, she said. Trump, in contrast, preferred a team largely of acolytes.
But when a perception does take hold in the general public, any slipup can feed it, whether it’s relevant or not.
When Biden tumbled on his bicycle in Delaware in June, his foot or feet caught within the pedals’ cages, the mishap fed the perception of a president not at the highest of his game physically.
“Those of us that know somewhat about aging were pretty impressed by the incontrovertible fact that he was on his bicycle to start with … that you have anyone who is actually energetic and healthy for his age,” said Olshansky. As an alternative, the main focus was on his injury-free fall.
Ageism pops up in campaigns even when opposing candidates are each old themselves; witness Trump’s references to “Sleepy Joe” in 2020 and Biden’s characterization of Trump as “mentally deranged.”
But it surely was particularly pronounced within the 2008 presidential contest between Obama, 47 in that fall’s campaign, and Sen. John McCain, then 72.
When Obama misidentified town he was in, the flub was attributed to an extended day by a nation-trotting barnstormer, Jamieson said. When McCain did that, it was his age.
The Obama campaign exploited the age gap in what Jamieson said were underhanded ways. She noticed and, along with her technical team, confirmed that in at the very least two ads, recordings of McCain had been slowed right down to make him sound mentally feeble.
However the sharpest cracks about age got here from McCain himself.
“Good evening, my fellow Americans,” he said on “Saturday Night Live.” “I ask you, what should we be in search of in our next president? Definitely someone who could be very, very, very old.”
