Joe Biden’s age is becoming more of an issue for the 79-year-old president, his team and his party as he plans to run for a second term, according to the New York Times.
Older than former President Ronald Reagan was at the end of two terms, Biden would be 86 at the end of a second term, and the Times noted polls show many Americans consider him too old — as do some Democratic strategists.
Biden himself has said questions about his fitness are reasonable to ask even as he reassures Americans that he is in good shape. But even some admirers question whether that will last six more years.
“I do feel it’s inappropriate to seek that office after you’re 80 or in your 80s,” said David Gergen, a top adviser to four presidents. “I have just turned 80 and I have found over the last two or three years I think it would have been unwise for me to try to run any organization. You’re not quite as sharp as you once were.”
Some experts put Biden in a category of “super-agers” who remain unusually fit as they advance in years, the news outlet noted.
“Right now, there’s no evidence that the age of Biden should matter one ounce,” S. Jay Olshansky, a longevity specialist at the University of Illinois, Chicago who studied the candidates’ ages in 2020, told the Times. “If people don’t like his policies, they don’t like what he says, that’s fine, they can vote for someone else. But it’s got nothing to do with how old he is.”
But, he added, it’s legitimate to wonder if that would remain so at 86.
“That’s the right question to be asking,” he told the Times. “You can’t sugarcoat aging. Things go wrong as we get older and the risks rise the older we get.”
Biden’s fitness has already hurt his public standing, the Times reported, citing a June survey by Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies and the Harris Poll, 64% of voters believed he was showing that he is too old to be president, including 60% of respondents 65 or older.
Until now, the oldest president was Reagan, who “understood this issue, both intuitively and he had thought it through,” biographer Lou Cannon told the Times. “And he told me, ‘Age will be an issue if I act old and it won’t if I don’t.’”
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