“A sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.” That’s how Special Counsel Robert K. Hur recently described President Joe Biden in a Department of Justice report recounting the president’s callous treatment of classified documents after his departure from the vice presidency in 2017. From a legal perspective, the president’s questionable memory was a get-out-of-jail free card — the Special Counsel emphasized that Biden’s chronic forgetfulness would make it challenging to convince a jury that the president had willfully mishandled classified information. Politically, though, the report is a nightmare — a shocking confirmation of the public’s worst suspicions about President Biden’s mental fitness for office. The Hur report confirms what many Americans already thought: Joe Biden is too old to be president.
The storm in which President Biden finds himself is not solely a product of the Hur report. Indeed, the report is damaging precisely because it reinforces what many Americans have seen for the past three years. The same week Hur’s memo was released, for example, NBC News reported that Biden twice confused European leaders with their long-deceased predecessors at closed-press campaign events. And in his White House press conference responding to the Hur report, Biden confused Egypt and Mexico as he discussed the war in Gaza. Any YouTube novice can confirm Biden’s decline for themselves — just listen to a speech he gave during his term as vice president, such as the one at the 2012 Democratic National Convention, and compare it to a speech given after the special council report from this year.
To say that Biden’s age is the problem, though, is to be somewhat imprecise. He really has three distinct problems, each of which should disqualify a man campaigning for “the hardest job in the world,” per John Dickerson’s book title. First is the forgetfulness, as outlined in the Hur report. The President clearly struggles to recall key details of past interactions, including who he spoke with on a given call and which position staff members have taken in policy debates. Second is a lack of vigor. Reporting from The New York Times has indicated that the President keeps short hours, and their analysis has shown that he schedules prime-time events far less often than his predecessors. Finally, Biden’s age has taken a toll on his ability to communicate effectively. His aides are obviously afraid to put him in anything but the most scripted public forums; as the Associated Press recently noted, Biden has given only one-fifth as many interviews as Barack Obama had at the same time in his first term. And when Biden’s staff have put the President in front of adversarial media, the results have been disastrous. His press conference after the release of the Hur report is a perfect example: An event intended to offer a forceful response to the age question instead amplified those fears, as the president angrily stumbled his way through a prepared text before confusing two key allies during a question-and-answer period.
From a governing perspective, the issues of forgetfulness and vigor are more important, likely to have serious negative ramifications for our nation in a moment of crisis. Biden’s utter inability to make a case for himself, though, is possibly his greatest liability as we enter the heat of campaign season — and no amount of spin by Biden’s campaign flacks can make the problem go away. Biden and his team try to elide the age question by emphasizing the President’s experience and wisdom. Their response misses the point: What good is forty-plus years of Washington experience if you can’t remember it? On the claim that Biden’s experience has translated to wisdom, his record speaks for itself: sky-high inflation and cascading foreign crises in Afghanistan, Ukraine and the Middle East.
The simple truth is that nothing but a public demonstration of vigor and force from Biden himself is going to move the needle on the age issue. That’s how President Reagan, the oldest president in American history prior to Joe Biden, successfully addressed his age during his 1984 campaign. Facing questions about his ability to handle the stress of the office, Reagan threw a knockout punch during the second presidential debate, saying, “I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” It’s hard to imagine President Biden coming up with such a clever response; it’s even harder to picture Biden delivering the line successfully. The Biden-Reagan comparison is simple, and so is the conclusion: Joe Biden is too old to be president.
