An Old Person Considers Whether Biden Is Too Old

Joe Biden would be 86-and-two-months old when his second term ends—if he is reelected in November and Trump doesn’t stage a more successful insurrection. Donald Trump himself—a comparative youngster—would be a presumably still-corpulent 82 at the end of a second term.  

These sure sound more like nursing-home ages than productive-member-of-the-workforce ages. And, you would think, it would be useful to have someone with their wits about them in the big job.

Indeed, I had recently begun to think that I myself, at the age of 74, ought not to be president—due to some annoying short-term memory issues: “Oh, it was today that I was supposed to pick up the grandkids after school!”

However, the more I look into it, the more I realize that I, or someone else for whom lots slips the mind, would be fine in the White House. That’s because I—or they, or, presumably second-term Biden—would be surrounded by people whose job is to remember stuff for you.

Indeed, David Frum recently wrote in The Atlantic about the “cheat sheets” he prepared for the then not-very-old President George W. Bush, before meetings: including names of an “event’s attendees, each spelled out phonetically.”  (One wishes that Frum had scribbled on one of Bush-the-Younger’s “cheat sheets”: “Don’t invade another country for no good reason.”)

Couldn’t we all benefit from some cheat sheets: with the names of all friendly neighbors or of our great nieces. I could take or leave such perks of the presidency as the Marine Band or the Rose Garden (ruined by Melania Trump), but how cool would that be?

It’s also true, alas, that—with the exception of my friend Jim, who still double-checks every receipt—old people have trouble with math. Although I’m seven years younger than Biden (how’s that for subtraction?), I admit that I had to use my fingers to work out Biden’s age at the end of a putative second term.

However, the ability to multiply seven times eight doesn’t seem a requirement for the presidency. We’re not engaging Joe Biden to calculate the exact size of the deficit in January 2025. But there is a reasonable chance that, if reelected with a Democratic Congress, Biden might succeed in getting our billionaires to pay a couple of percent more in taxes to lower that deficit.

For, as you have undoubtedly heard before, the old have one big advantage over the young: experience and the wisdom it (often) brings. Here’s David Istance, a former fellow at the Brookings Institution, on the aging brain: “The evidence supporting decline, refers primarily to cognitive skills, when increasingly the non-cognitive and socio-emotional capacities are recognized as critical for a wide set of outcomes….It is on such matters as perseverance, teamwork and collaboration even creativity that we might expect older adults to do just as well if not better than younger ones.”

Few if any White Houses in recent memory have run as smoothly and been as scandal free as Biden’s: that’s certainly evidence of teamwork and collaboration. And you certainly felt Biden’. experience and wisdom when he decided to end, after 20 unsuccessful years, the war in Afghanistan. Trump had talked about pulling all U.S. troops out, but he did not pull all U.S. troops out. You felt that experience, too, when Joe Biden was working the phones to direct international military aid to Ukraine.

And Biden, having been a senator, vice president or president for a total of 48 years, doesn’t have to look to Georgia or Arkansas or Anthony Scaramucci for advisors to help with the big issues. He got and presumably will continue to get the DC Democrats’ first team.

With their help and his own deep experience with Congress, Biden got an infrastructure bill passed. He got some social programs passed. He got some small steps to control global warming passed. (Though Biden, with all his experience, does seem to have been snookered by Bibi Netanyahu.)

Trump, whose advisors came and went almost as fast as Melania’s outfits, got a tax cut for the rich passed. That was about it for legislation. And, oh yeah, he pulled the United States out of the Paris Climate Accord, and he was, and apparently remains, snookered by the even more autocratic and dangerous Vladimir Putin. It is also possible to be old and very unwise.

Here’s my conclusion (worked out without using my fingers): a reasonably wise old person with a collection of smart advisors, tons of experience and a commitment to democracy at home and abroad, ought to be able to keep the government running reasonably smoothly and effectively for an additional four years.