The risks of age, and the value of experience

On Biden seeking a second term.

Sunday’s New York Times featured a meticulously reported story on President Biden’s physical and mental state as he runs for a second term.

The White House acknowledged the subject is fair—he would be eighty-six at the end of his second term, almost a decade older than any sitting president has ever been. On NPR in April, David Axelrod said it’s “indisputable” that Biden needs to address it. “When you look at polling, when you watch focus groups, it's the thing that people bring up first.”

The right-wing cartoon version of this concern suggests Biden is doddering and lost. The view of Democrats like Axelrod is simply that he is eighty, and doing “the hardest job on the planet.”

The NPR story demonstrated why people bring it up. NPR played sound of Biden delivering a powerful speech at the 2016 Democratic convention, then played part of his 2023 State of the Union speech. You can hear the difference. The voice sounds thinner. Biden has been on the national stage for more than fifty years, allowing people to witness the effects of time.

Biden’s aides use that same 2023 speech as evidence he is up to the job. Heckled by Republican lawmakers, the president cheerfully sparred with them on national TV. But the Times reported that he speaks so softly that aides sometimes give him a hand-held microphone, in case his voice doesn’t carry the extra inches to the microphone on the lectern. Video shows a president who walks more stiffly than he once did; and though he’s also fit and trim, aides try to limit his public appearances to early afternoons.

The Times said that Biden has yet to give an interview to its newsroom since taking office. The president has not given an interview to NPR since 2019.

Axelrod said White House efforts to answer the public’s concerns were not yet “enough.” Biden “is going to have to talk about the obvious risks,” but also the upsides. “The upside [is] wisdom; the upside is experience; the upside is perspective.”

Two things stand in Biden’s favor. One is that his leading Republican challenger is about to turn 77, and would himself turn eighty while in office.

The other is that Biden daily makes his case for “experience” and “perspective.” It’s built into his speaking style.

Each president of my adult life has had a distinctive style, which tended to express his idea of the job. George W. Bush, who called himself “the decider,” worked with advisers to make his sentences shorter, tighter—clearly stating principles on which he would decide. (“You are either with us, or against us.”) Barack Obama spoke in complete and punctuated paragraphs, which reflected his sometimes elaborate policy deliberations. Donald Trump stressed his personal authority more than any policy or governing system—his sole power to pardon, for example, or to launch nuclear weapons, or just to dominate the scene. (“I alone can fix it.”)

Biden speaks of governing systems, and of dealing with the human beings within them. Negotiating with Republicans in recent weeks over the debt ceiling, he said he wasn’t concerned when the talks appeared to stall. “I’ve been in these negotiations before,” he told reporters. “What happens is the first meetings weren’t all that progressive. The second ones were. The third one was. And then, what happens is they — the carriers go back to the principals and say, ‘This is what we’re thinking about.’ And then, people put down new claims.”

Days later Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy reached an agreement, and Biden gave a speech from the Oval Office. The official White House transcript shows some of the stumbles and miscues that his critics seize on. (“I want to commend Senator — Speaker McCarthy. You know, he nd I, we — and our teams — we were able to get along and get things done.”)

But something else came through while listening live, as I did on the car radio. Biden gets his meaning across. He acknowledges how government works and says what he is trying to do with it. This is not to say his policies are right or wrong, but that he gives a reasonably nuanced explanation.

He described his reasons for cutting a deal in divided government and moving on, leaving other matters to be fought over in the next election. It’s a process. At one point he spoke of protecting a law that allows Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices, which he said he’d been seeking for “thirty years.”

The president nearest his style was the other Bush, George H.W., elected in 1988. Bush also was criticized for gaffes. He also was one of the older presidents. But years after he left office, my work required me to go into the NPR archives and listen to an old Bush press conference. He sounded different from whatever politicians I was hearing on TV at the time. He was clear and logical. Without using fancy words, he delivered sophisticated thoughts.

Bush, like Biden, was in government for decades before he led it. Maybe that’s why he gave the impression of having thought before he spoke.

Thanks for reading Differ We Must, a companion to my forthcoming biography of Lincoln—which tells his life story through his meetings with people who disagreed with him. It’s a story of Lincoln’s time that reflects on our own. I hope you’ll preorder here.