Breaking News! Joe Biden Still Old!

Why I'm Ignoring "The Coverup"

Joe Biden is an octogenarian. I freely admit that he was too old to run for president in 2024 and we would have been better served if he’d decided to keep to his plan to be a one-term president providing a transition to new leadership.

Joe Biden is old. But that is not news, in the sense of being something we didn’t know. He was 74 when his vice presidential term ended in 2017 and 77 when running for president in 2020.

Biden’s age was a factor in that campaign. Congressman Eric Swalwell made that a point during one of the primary debates. He noted that Biden had called for “passing the torch” to younger leaders back in 1987, when Swalwell was six years old. Pete Buttigieg is two years younger than Swalwell. Other candidates in that race, like Booker, Harris, and Klobuchar were still a generation younger than Biden. Warren, Sanders, and Bloomberg were closer to Biden’s age.

I rehearse this to point out that there was a potential “pass the torch” moment in 2020. The primary voters weren’t interested. While there was some early excitement around a candidate like Buttigieg, it was hard for him to consolidate support in a crowded field. When Congressman James Clyburn endorsed Biden in advance of the South Carolina primary, the dynamics of the race changed. Buttigieg and Klobuchar threw their support behind Biden and Sanders followed shortly thereafter.

Joe Biden was old when he became the nominee and he was old when he took office. He continued to be old as he planned to run for a second term. I’d argue that he decided to do so because he believed a second Trump term would be devastating for our democracy. That last four months have shown that to be very prescient.

I repeat: he shouldn’t have run for reelection. And he should have combined his “protect democracy” message with a “revitalize the main street economy” message.

But it’s somehow news again that Joe Biden is old. This was prompted by recent tell-all books on the Biden administration trying to answer the Watergate-era question, “What did the [president’s people] know and when did [they] know it?” Yesterday Politico had a review essay on the three books that have recently been released.

The former president’s deterioration and the effort to hide it from the public feature prominently in three recent tomes about the 2024 campaign: Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House by the veteran campaign book-writing duo Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes; Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History by Chris Whipple; and, most sensationally, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, It’s Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. The first two focus more squarely on Biden’s ill-fated reelection campaign, while the third, which publishes this week, zeroes in on the cover-up itself.

I’m not going to read any of these books. I have serious questions about their newsworthiness. Thanks to John Fea, I was clued in to Jon Stewart’s monologue Monday night pointing out the breathless coverage and self-promotion of these books (especially Tapper’s).

But Biden forgot people’s names! He got the details of stories wrong and often repeated himself! He fell asleep in some meetings! He wasn’t good in interviews or press gaggles that required him to speak clearly and precisely on policy matters! (If these factors are disqualifying for a president, then Kamala Harris would be president today!)

What I haven’t seen in the reporting about “the bombshells” in the book are any examples of actual government policy being damaged by Biden’s age. The Covid response was a general success. The Infrastructure Act set forth long term possibilities for economic expansion as did the climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS Act. The administration protected Ukraine from being overrun in the early days of the Russian invasion. Macroeconomic indicators soared (even if people didn’t feel it).

Yes, the Afghanistan withdrawal was not as well planned as it needed to be. There should have been a more forceful corrective against Israel as the attacks on Gaza created such humanitarian suffering. They were too slow in addressing the southern border after the courts ended Title 42.

So why did the Biden team protect Biden from showing his increasing frailty to the American public? First, that’s their job. They are working on behalf of the administration’s objectives and when the press was incessantly focused on Biden being old, any “gaffe” would lead the evening news.

Also, what were they supposed to do? Let him go out in public and flail around? Presidents throughout our history have had weaknesses that staff attempted to hide or mitigate (see FDR or JFK). Should they have used the 25th amendment to declare him incompetent? Gone on the talk shows to announce that “the president is out of it” and sparking a constitutional crisis?

Then there is the political factor. Going back to the 2020 campaign, Trump and his proxies at Fox News were claiming daily that Biden was mentally incompetent. Not that Biden was old (he was) but that he was basically nonfunctional. It’s not hard to imagine that allowing Biden’s weaknesses to be public would play into that frame and they wanted to avoid that.

Even now, President Trump is railing about “the autopen” and suggesting that someone else was running the previous administration. Even while Trump is signing executive orders he clearly hasn’t read, allowing his cabinet folks and advisors to rewrite existing law, and allowing people like Musk and Miller to do their own thing.

And now Biden has been diagnosed with stage four prostate cancer. Not five or nine as the Trump family suggests. His PET scan showed that the cancer had metastasized to the bone. I had similar scores when I had my bout of prostate cancer and one of the first things the doctor called for was a PET scan. Thankfully, mine was contained.

From what I’ve read about Biden’s diagnosis, men of his age did not regularly have PSA tests. His age worked against him yet again.

By the way, there are now claims that he must have had this for a long time for it to now be at this stage. That may or may not be the case. It had been four years or so since my previous negative prostate check when I was diagnosed in November of 2023. It can advance rapidly, as is true with most cancers.

Joe Biden is old. And he shouldn’t have run for reelection. Not because he wasn’t competent but because he couldn’t manage the demands of modern campaigning. The June debate demonstrated that in spades.

It’s impossible to work through the counterfactual of what would have happened had Joe Biden not run. There would have been a serious contest for the Democratic nomination. Responding to Gaza/Israel and Russia/Ukraine would still be a challenge. People would have still blamed Democrats for the perceived poor economy and high inflation.

But we know that huge percentages of the voting public thought Biden was too old for another term. This was a major factor for younger voters who, like Swalwell in 2020, wanted to see a passing of the torch. Recognizing that reality might have lessened the defection of many young people and would certainly have changed the dynamics of those who opted not to vote at all in 2024 (G. Elliott Morris argues that this latter factor was determinative.)

I read today that the Catalyst report on the 2024 election is now out. Rather than relying on exit polls, this analysis matches actual voting behavior with a variety of factors. I plan to write about Catalyst on Friday.

Joe Biden is old. Donald Trump is old. Too many congressional leaders are old. Three Democratic congressman have actually died since the beginning of this congressional term.¹There are senators in their 90s.

It’s good to see a major increase in the number of younger candidates now running for office. They appear to have the energy, the creativity, and the pragmatism to make a significant difference in our government policies going forward. And because they have experienced the impact of economic strains going back to 2008, they are less likely to settle on “work requirements for medicaid” as a serious proposal to deal with entitlements.

Joe Biden is old. But we don’t need a series of books piling on the last administration because of that fact. And we certainly don’t need our news sources ignoring our current crisis in order to chase the laser pointer that is that latest anecdote about Biden getting lost in a speech.

Joe Biden is old. And he shouldn’t have run again. His administration was impactful in a number of important ways.

Let it go already.

1. The final vote on the One Big Beautiful Bill was 215 for, 214 against (included 2 Republicans), 1 present, and 2 not voting. If those three congressmen were alive (or had resigned and let someone fill their seat), the bill would have failed.