WASHINGTON (AP) — People in their 80s are running countries, creating majestic art and performing feats of endurance, with one even climbing Mount Everest. It’s almost time for Joe Biden, 80 on Sunday, to decide if he still has a mountain to climb – that of a second term as president.
Questions are now swirling over whether he has what it takes to return to the top.
The oldest president in US history, Biden is celebrating his milestone birthday at a crossroads, as he and his family must decide in the coming months whether to announce his re-election.
Biden’s aides and allies say he intends to run. Yet the president himself may seem equivocal. “My intention is to race again,” he said at a press conference this month. “But I’m a big acceptor of fate.”
“We’re going to have discussions about that,” he said. Aides expect those conversations to resume over the holidays, with no decision until 2023.
To watch Biden at work is to watch a leader tap into a reservoir of knowledge accumulated over half a century in public service as he draws on deep personal connections at home and abroad, his mastery of politics and his familiarity with the workings of Washington. In short, the wisdom of the elderly.
But to observe Biden is also to see him now often walk with a jerky gait.
It is to see him having a formal dinner with other leaders without any real explanation, as happened during his trip abroad last week. Some supporters wince when he speaks, hoping he will get his words across.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision at 82 to step back from leadership and let a new generation rise may ripple through Biden’s thinking and that of her party as Democrats ponder whether they want to go with a proven winner or look to youthful energy.
Among the questions raised by Pelosi’s decision, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, an authority on political communications at the University of Pennsylvania: “Even if one is very competent and successful, is there a time when the ‘one should step aside to give others the opportunity to lead?
She said, “Pelosi’s decision makes these questions more important in the context of Biden’s declaration in 2020 that he was the bridge to a new generation of leaders.”
Biden’s verbal flubs have been legendary throughout his five-decade political career, so determining the impact of age on his acuity is a game for “living room gerontologists,” as Dr. S. Jay puts it. Olshansky, an aging expert. .
In the distorted mirrors of social media commentary, every slip is amplified into supposed evidence of senility. A moment of silent reflection from Biden is featured as the President falls asleep.
Still, some allies see Biden’s mistakes as growing vulnerability as he ages.
In an AP VoteCast survey of the electorate this month, 58% of voters said he lacked the mental capacity to serve effectively as president. It was a bleak picture of the present, not just in the run-up to another potential term.
Ahead of the 2020 election, Olshansky of the University of Illinois at Chicago published a paper that predicted Biden and his Republican rival Donald Trump needed to maintain good health beyond the end of this presidential term.
Nothing changed Olshansky’s opinion.
“While President Biden may chronologically be 80, biologically he probably isn’t,” he said. “And biological age is far more important than chronological age.”
Biden is already in the top performers club for people his age. Unlike 92% of people 75 and older in the United States, he still has a job.
And he has the wind in his sails. The November election produced the best result for a midterm Democratic presidential party in decades. The president has also sealed back-to-back legislative victories in recent months, on climate, infrastructure, health care expansion, military aid to Ukraine and more.
Biden says he starts most days with an 8 a.m. workout.
“If I give up for a week, I feel it,” he told the “Smartless” podcast. “Before, I could go there for a week and nothing would change.”
White House aides say Biden reads his briefing book late into the night, holds intensive evening meetings with advisers and isn’t shy about planning requests that can get him out late, though rarely up early. . Biden was diagnosed with several common age-related health conditions, none of which caused serious problems.
Much of the leadership in the US Congress is over 70, especially Democrats, as are Biden’s main rivals in the 2020 Democratic primaries and Trump.
Attribute this, in part, to increased longevity.
“Life expectancy around 1900 in the United States was about 50 years,” Olshansky said, “and we’ve added about 30 years” since then.
In Cockeysville, Md., outside of Baltimore, Nelson Hyman, 85, and his wife, Roz Hyman, 77, credit Biden with getting it right and more importantly naming a strong team. For these Democrats, that adds up to an effective presidency that harnesses the value of age in a society that often does not.
“I’ve always thought the president is only as good as the people he appoints, and I think he’s appointed very, very good people, very capable people, and he uses them,” Roz said, 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?”
Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, said that when a perception takes hold in the public, any error can fuel it, whether it’s relevant or not.
When Biden fell on his bike in Delaware in June, the mishap fueled perceptions of a president not at the top of his physical game.
“Those of us who know a bit about aging were quite impressed that he was on his bike to begin with…that you have someone who is really active and healthy for his age,” said Olshansky. Instead, the focus was on his injury-free fall.
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Associated Press writers Mark Sherman and Lauran Neergaard contributed to this report.
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