At 78-years-old or the age of the average male life expectancy, 2020 front-runner Joe Biden would be older on Inauguration Day than Ronald Reagan, our oldest-ever president, was on his last day in office.
Uncle Joe is old, and it shows. He still has a megawatt smile and a way with the crowd, but Biden’s signature penchant for putting his foot in his mouth has accelerated. He repeatedly forgets what state he’s in on the campaign trail, he rambles off on incoherent rants about Corn Pop and his leg hair, and his debate performances pale in comparison to his showmanship of the past.
But Biden is also the safe bet of the 2020 election, and if he’s a little more tired on the trail, it doesn’t terribly harm the case that his candidacy would restore the relative political calm of the pre-Trump era. But a 78-year-old president is a massively different case than an 86-year-old one, the age Biden would be if he won reelection and finished a second term.
Biden apparently knows this, and so he’s signaling to the press — note how I didn’t say he’s signaling to aides because that’s a lie — that he won’t run for a second term. Contrary to some pundits’ opinion that this is a concession, this is a politically smart call, surely a calculated leak from his campaign intended to make his candidacy more palatable. Because if Biden wins, he can always run for reelection in 2024 anyway, assuming he’s still alive.
Biden elected not to run for president in 2016, in large part because of the recent death of his son Beau and in small part to stay clear of the Clinton juggernaut. He might have opted to stay retired this time, too, but the open lane cried out to him. There are no serious Democratic candidates in the race who want to run on the Obama agenda, so why not?
Now, if Biden commits publicly to a boring, one-term presidency, he can offer the nation a four-year break from chaos and both parties a desperately needed reset.
And then he can change his mind later and win and serve a second term.
It’s sneaky and clever, and all it requires is to get “four people who regularly talk to Biden” to run their mouths to a reporter. So old Joe’s still got a trick or two up his sleeve, evidently.
