Is Biden too old for another term?
Most men Joe Biden’s age are retired gents putting on the green or puttering in the garden, or trudging off to Walmart or Walgreens to get their meds. But Joe Biden is not like the rest of us.
Elected to the Senate at the age of 30 in 1972, two years later he was telling a group of Washington insiders:
“I’m proud to be a politician. There is no other work in life which can do more for mankind than politics…. You might think I’m off the wall when I say this, but I believe what Plato said 2,000 years ago, ‘The penalty good men pay for not becoming involved in politics is being governed by men worse than themselves.'”
According to Kitty Kelley, in a 1974 profile of Biden for Washingtonian magazine, Biden wowed the gathering of Democratic Party donors. He had them envisioning a second coming of Camelot.
It’s hard now to think of Joe Biden as the once bright-eyed wonder of American politics. His eyes have dulled, his step has slowed. But he’s still a Washington fixture. Heck, he’s THE fixture. He’s the president.
And at the age of 80, he’s gearing up for a final election campaign, this one for a second term in the White House. According to a book that will be published this week, “The Last Politician,” by Frank Foer, a former editor of the liberal New Republic, Biden sometimes feels his age, but bristles at the idea that he is not up to the job of “the most powerful man in the world.”
“You think I don’t know how (expletive deleted) old I am,” he has fumed to aides, remarking on the notion, confirmed by polling, that a wide swath of the public believes him to be a dithering, doddering old man whose dithering and doddering will grow to the point of incapacity by the time his second term would normally come to a close in January 2029.
Notwithstanding an occasional fumble here and a tumble there, it seems clear that Biden knows exactly what he is doing. Maybe of even greater significance, he knows how to do what he wants to do. The presidency, among other things, is an intellectual pursuit, and there’s no indication that Biden’s intellectual acuity is at the breaking point.
He can zig and zag and plan and plot with the best of them, baby.
In Kelley’s 1974 article, then-Senator Biden told the future celebrity biographer that he was a liberal on civil rights and health-care issues and a conservative on matters relating to abortion and military conscription.
In 2023, the draft is off the table and health care is largely decided (thanks to Obamacare, which, as vice president, Biden played a key legislative role), but civil rights and abortion remain front and center.
Strong for civil rights, Biden as president has moved with the times to bolster the Black drive for equity.
On abortion, President Biden has adopted the full-on language of today’s pro-choice movement, especially important for liberals and many suburban women in the aftermath of the downfall of Roe v. Wade at the hands of a conservative Supreme Court.
A spent mind pops no new corks. President Biden has been corks-apoppin’.
Not only did Biden get the best of 58-year old Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy during debt limit negotiations last spring, he has also helped to thwart 70-year old Russian president Vladimir Putin in bloody Ukraine, by spearheading the revival of NATO.
In November 2021, the president fashioned, against the steepest of odds, a bipartisan congressional coalition that passed a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that will be paying big dividends for the country for decades to come.
He followed this up with another hands-across-the-aisle extravaganza: a bill that steals a step on the Chinese by reviving U.S. semiconductor production. In its wake came the Inflation Reduction Act, with benefits ranging from lower prescription drug costs to shoring up black lung benefits for coal miners and dramatically expanding rural access to the internet.
Currently, Biden is executing a “remarkable break,” according to a critic, “with decades of U.S. trade policy” that favored corporate executives over American workers. As a still further example of his mental dexterity, Biden has stayed clear of anything involving “woke.”
As Biden told Kitty Kelley in 1974, “I don’t think the issues mean a great deal in terms of whether you win or lose” an election. “I think the issues are merely a vehicle to portray your intellectual capacity to voters.”
By this rule, Joe Biden measures up.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.