Now that former Vice President Joe Biden has cemented his status as the front-runner, his Democratic rivals for the 2020 nomination should be openly and aggressively making an issue out of his advanced age, which raises serious questions about whether he’d be able to fully carry out the duties of the presidency for a full term.
There’s no need to skirt around the issue, to subtly make points about the need for change and for fresh blood. It’s completely reasonable to raise legitimate concerns about whether he’ll be able to sustain the level of activity required to serve as commander in chief.
If elected, Biden would be 78 at the time of his inauguration. That would not only make him the oldest person ever to be elected president, but the oldest one to ever serve. Ronald Reagan, who faced questions about his mental decline during his second term, was younger when he left office than Biden would be upon taking office. Biden would be approaching 82 by the end of his first term. Even if Biden is in relatively good health for his age, the bottom line is that when people enter their 80s, they are at much greater risk of something happening that could lead to a rapid deterioration of their health. That would seem to be especially true if you add to the normal risks of aging the rigors of world travel and the daily stresses of the presidency.
The issue then is not just whether Biden could survive a first term. If he does not, he’ll be replaced by a vice president who Americans will have decided was sufficiently up to the task of assuming the presidency on a moment’s notice. The issue is about whether at his age people could be confident that he won’t decline over the course of his presidency in a way that would impair him from doing the job. There are many scenarios short of death that could still affect a president’s ability to perform at an optimal level, and the 25th Amendment would be unlikely to be invoked absent absolute incapacitation.
This issue crystallized for me the other day as I was reading Winston Churchill’s World War II memoirs. Churchill described Franklin D. Roosevelt’s declining health during the crucial, final months of the war when victory was certain and Britain and the United States were trying to negotiate with the Soviet Union over the fate of post-war Europe. There has been a long-standing historical debate over how FDR’s illness may have affected the outcome of Yalta and concessions to the Soviets. Some have argued that given the large Soviet troop presence in Eastern Europe, Joseph Stalin came into the conference with the much stronger hand to play, so the outcome was inevitable. But it’s undeniable that the arduous 14,000-mile sea journey to the conference in the Crimean coast weakened FDR physically during the February 1945 conference, and he would end up dying two months later. In that time in between, crucial questions were being decided such as how far east the U.S. should push into Germany to meet the Russian armies and the political autonomy of Poland. These were questions that would determine the shape of Europe for much of the 20th century. And yet, FDR was not able to fully engage during this time period, and once he died and Harry S. Truman took over, it took months for him to get up to speed. (Churchill himself dealt with health issues during his second run as prime minister, when he was in his late 70s and early 80s.)
It seems to me that there’s nothing mean or dirty about raising Biden’s age as an issue. It’s a legitimate risk posed by his presidency that needs to be adequately debated. It probably would be more convincingly done by his Democratic rivals in the primary than a septuagenarian Trump in the general election.
[Also read: Here’s how old Joe Biden’s Democratic rivals were when he was first elected to the Senate]
