Biden at 80 – ‘Fate worshiper’ mulls second bid for White House

People in their 80s run countries, create magnificent art and perform feats of endurance. One entered the record book for climbing Mount Everest. It’s almost time for Joe Biden, who turned 80 on Sunday, to decide if he has one more mountain to climb — that of a second term as president.

Now, questions are swirling within his own party, as well as across the country, about whether he has what it takes to climb back to the top.

The oldest president in US history, Mr Biden marks his milestone birthday at a personal crossroads as he and his family face a decision in the coming months on whether to announce his re-election bid.

He would be 86 at the end of a possible second term.

All of Mr. Biden’s aides and allies say he intends to run — and his team has begun quietly preparing for a campaign — but it has often been the president himself who has sounded the most equivocal.

“It is my intention to run again,” he said at a news conference this month. “But I have a lot of respect for fate. We will hold discussions on this,” he said.

Aides expect those talks to begin in earnest over Thanksgiving and Christmas, with a decision not made until after the New Year.

Mr. Biden plans to celebrate his birthday at a family brunch at the White House on Sunday.

To watch Mr. Biden at work is to see a leader tap into a storehouse of knowledge built up over half a century in public service as he draws on deep personal relationships at home and abroad, his mastery of politics and his knowledge of how Washington works or doesn’t.

In short, the wisdom of adults.

“There’s something to be said for experience,” said Matt Delmont, a historian at Dartmouth College, noting the dozens of world leaders in their 80s.

But to watch Mr. Biden is also to see him walking now, often with a halting gait, as opposed to his trotting across the stage on election night in 2020.

It’s to see him skip a formal dinner with other world leaders with no real explanation, as happened on his trip abroad last week, when he twice talked about visiting Colombia when he meant Cambodia.

Some supporters flinch when he speaks, hoping he will make good on his remarks.

The decision by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, at age 82, to step down from the leadership and let a new generation step up could affect the thinking of Mr. Biden and that of his party, as Democrats are considering whether they want to pick a proven winner or turn to the energy of youth.

Among the questions Pelosi’s move raises, said Kathleen Hall Jamison, a political communications specialist at the University of Pennsylvania: “Even if a person is very competent and successful, is there a point where they have to step back to give others the opportunity to lead just as others have stepped back to allow you to?

“Pelosi’s decision makes such questions more important in the context of Mr. Biden’s 2020 announcement that he is the bridge to a new generation of leaders.”

Mr. Biden’s gaffes have been the stuff of legend throughout his five-decade political career, so guessing the effect of age on his acumen is a guessing game for “armchair gerontologists,” like Dr. S.J. Olshansky, an aging expert. puts it.

In the warped mirrors of social media commentary, any mistake is magnified into supposed evidence of senility.

A moment of silent reflection by Mr Biden during a meeting is shown as the president nods.

All of this went into Donald Trump’s quiver of lies when he announced on Tuesday that he would run for president again.

Some allies see Mr. Biden’s missteps as a growing vulnerability in the eyes of voters as he ages.

In an AP VoteCast poll of the electorate this month, as many as 58 percent of voters said he lacked the mental capacity to serve effectively as president.

It was a bleak picture of his situation now, not just anticipation of another potential term. Only 34% said he was a strong leader.

These findings come alongside significantly low approval ratings in line with Mr Trump’s at this point in his presidency.

Two months before the 2020 election, Olshansky of the University of Illinois at Chicago published a paper predicting that both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump are bound to remain in good health beyond the end of this presidency.

Based on a scientific team’s assessment of available medical records, family history and other information, the paper also concluded that both men were likely “super-elderly,” a subset of people who maintain mental and physical functioning and tend to live longer than the average person their age.

Nothing has changed Olshansky’s opinion of the two.

“Although President Biden may chronologically be 80 years old, biologically he probably isn’t,” he said. “And biological age is far more important than chronological age.” He calls Biden “a classic example of everything good about aging … and so his age, I think, should be almost completely irrelevant.”

Mr. Biden is already in the club of high achievers for people his age. Unlike 92% of people 75 and older in the US, he still has a job, not to mention an extremely demanding one.

And he’s been on a roll. The November election produced the best result for a Democratic presidential midterm in decades — despite the poison pill of high inflation — as Democrats retained control of the Senate, narrowly lost the House despite expectations of defeat and won several competitive races. governors’ races in key states.

The president has also sealed a string of back-to-back legislative victories in recent months on climate, infrastructure, health care expansion, military aid to Ukraine and more.

Mr. Biden says he starts most days with an 8 a.m. workout, when he usually joins his personal trainer and physical therapist, Drew Contreras, if he’s not riding his Peloton bike.

“If I leave it for a week, I feel it,” he said recently on the “Smartless” podcast. “I used to be able to go for a week and nothing would change.”

White House aides say Mr. Biden reads his briefing book late into the night, holds intense evening meetings with advisers and has never shied away from their schedule requests, which can keep him out late, though rarely. to get up early.

Still, his aides are deeply protective of the president, especially with his public schedule lighter than that of Barack Obama and George W. Bush, both far younger in office. They kept him out of official interviews and, until recently, press conferences.

To doubters he says, “Watch me.”

Mr. Biden has been diagnosed with several very common age-related health conditions, none of which cause him serious problems.

In his November 2021 summary of Mr. Biden’s health after the president’s first full medical examination in office, Dr. Kevin O’Connor noted that Mr. Biden’s gait had become somewhat stiffer, something , which doctors watch for in older patients because it can signal a risk of falling.

But after testing, the doctor concluded that it was mostly due to continued arthritis “wear and tear” on the spine, as well as compensation for a broken foot suffered a year earlier, and the development of “mild peripheral neuropathy,” or subtle damage to some sensory nerves in the legs.

Experts say age is not destiny; what matters is good health, fitness and functioning.

Japanese mountaineer Yuichiro Miura had enough of these qualities to summit Everest in 2013 at the age of 80, setting a record that an 85-year-old Nepalese man died trying to break in 2017.

Aging is inexorable – at whatever speed it comes.