Joe Biden’s campaign announced the backing of former congressman Neal Smith, 99, the latest endorsement from ex-lawmakers decades beyond retirement age.
The 76-year-old former vice president’s team boasted on Tuesday that it had earned the endorsement of Smith, who served in the House of Representatives from 1959 to 1995, crossing over with Biden, who entered the Senate in 1973. Like Biden, Smith spent 36 years in Congress.
Smith lost his congressional seat in the 1994 Republican wave, which ended 40 straight years of Democratic majorities. Biden spent eight more years in Washington after being picked as Barack Obama’s vice-presidential running mate in 2008 and now lives in a mansion in McLean, Virginia, in the capital city’s suburbs.
According to the Biden campaign’s press release, Smith said: “In all of my years serving Iowa, seldom have I had the opportunity to work with a leader that not only understood the needs of Iowa families and businesses, but championed their cause as effectively as Vice President Joe Biden. Joe has the cool and deliberate disposition, and the straight-shooting common sense that disarmed even the most stubborn opposition across the aisle.”
A World War II bomber pilot, he survived his plane being shot down and he received a Purple Heart, nine battle stars, and the Air Medal with four oak leaf clusters.
Iowa’s Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge, the 26-mile Neal Smith Trail, and the Neal Smith Federal Building in Des Moines are named after him. His wife Bea died at age 92 in 2016 after spending several years in a nursing home. The Neal and Bea Smith Law Center at Drake University is named after them.
Since announcing his third White House run, Biden has repeatedly faced questions about whether he is too old for the job. If elected president, he would be 78 years and 51 days old on his inauguration day in 2021 — the oldest man ever to occupy the Oval Office. Ronald Reagan was 77 years and 349 days old when he left the White House.
A Pew poll released in June found that only 3% of Democratic or likely Democratic voters say the ideal age for a presidential candidate is someone in their 70s. A separate Suffolk University/USA Today survey concluded that a third of likely Iowa caucus voters had severe concerns about Biden’s age, so much so that they couldn’t find themselves supporting him.
Last month, he told voters that he won’t accept the label of being “the old guy” in the race. “I refuse to accept, ‘He’s the old guy.’ I refuse to accept the status quo,” he said at a Silicon Valley fundraiser.
