As the second set of primary debates approach, the New York Times is out with a new piece on the growing worries among Democrats concerning Joe Biden’s age.
Authors Katie Gluck and Jonathan Martin report that the campaign is being besieged by unsolicited advice to combat these fears, “Some of these would-be wordsmiths have suggested invoking a version of [Ronald] Reagan’s ‘there you go again’ from his 1980 debate with Jimmy Carter a few months before Mr. Reagan’s 70th birthday. Others have urged Mr. Biden to defuse questions about his age by employing Mr. Reagan’s rejoinder about not holding Walter Mondale’s ‘youth and inexperience‘ against him, a line that helped Mr. Reagan bounce back from a lackluster first debate in 1984.”
Ripping off some of Reagan’s most famous debate moments is not going to help Biden’s situation, however.
To start with, the moments were clever and witty for Reagan, but Biden would look like a copycat trying to borrow or adapt them, which would be especially problematic for a politician whose first presidential run went down in flames over a plagiarism scandal. Those who don’t remember the moments will just have to be reminded about politics in the 1980s, when Biden was still a veteran senator, thus reinforcing the age issue.
Beyond that, the examples are not all that comparable. In Reagan’s case, both moments came when he was younger than Biden is now. In fact, were Biden elected he’d be 78 by the time he gets sworn in, which is older than Reagan was when he left office. Biden is already three years older than Reagan was during the Mondale debate.
Also, in Reagan’s case, both of those moments came when the race was in a general election, the second one at a time when Reagan was running as an incumbent during a booming economy. By that point, it was more or less a choice between Reagan or his opponent. But Democrats are now in the primary process, and the party’s voters have the option of choosing other, younger, candidates to go up against Trump. It is not a binary.
The truth is that there’s no easy way for Biden to diffuse the age issue. He certainly isn’t going to do it with one killer line. Ultimately, he has to survive the age issue during the primary by focusing on his strengths as a candidate and convincing enough voters that he has enough positive things going for him that it’s worth looking past his age. Once Biden gets in the general election, he’ll inherit the anti-President Trump vote, and he’ll be running against an opponent who himself is in his 70s.
