Joe Biden, 81, likes to use humor to downplay his age. He hosted Democratic governors at a closed-door meeting at the White House on Wednesday and told them he was in good health before adding: “It’s just my brain.” It’s a risky joke for a president who three in four Americans consider too old to run for re-election and who millions of television viewers watched struggle to get his speech across in last week’s debate against Donald Trump. Biden is willing to defy his biological and political clock. The countdown to his career is ticking, but he believes he still has the energy to win the election again and hold the presidency until he is 86.
Since the fateful night of the debate, Biden has received support from the first lady, Jill Biden; the rest of his family, and leading figures in the Democratic Party, including his vice president, Kamala Harris, the main alternative to replace him if he were to step aside. At the same time, however, he has received strong media pressure (with the newspaper The New York Times at the front), political (some congressmen, advisors and Democratic strategists) and financial (donors) to withdraw.
At the Independence Day celebration at the White House on Thursday, he had already said: “I’m not going anywhere.” On Friday, he was defiant in Madison, Wisconsin, where he held a rally, gave an interview to ABC News and met with reporters at the airport. “I’m running and I’m going to win again,” he shouted to hundreds of supporters gathered in a school sports hall. “I’m still in the race, I’m going to beat Trump,” he added. “I’m the candidate of the Democratic Party. You voted for me to be your nominee, not for anyone else,” he insisted.
Biden was later asked at the airport whether he was leaving the door open to withdrawing or ruling it out. “I completely rule it out,” he replied, reproaching reporters for having already shown little faith in his electoral chances in 2020 and 2022. The White House reacted quickly on Wednesday to categorically deny a headline from the White House that The New York Times in which Biden was said to be considering withdrawing from the re-election race, prompting the New York newspaper to change its information.
The president is aware that much is at stake in his public appearances these days. Biden’s image is so bad that his campaign had presented it as a great challenge to grant an interview. The president entrenched himself in saying that what happened in the debate was just “a bad night” due to the fact that he was “exhausted” and “sick.” In what critics describe as an attitude of denial, he undermined the credibility of the polls that give him low popularity and place him clearly behind Donald Trump in voting intention: “I don’t think there is anyone more qualified than me to be president or win this race,” he said.
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The interviewer, George Stephanopoulos, a former top Bill Clinton adviser turned star ABC News anchor, asked the president if he would be willing to undergo independent neurological testing to certify his mental acuity. “I have a cognitive test every day,” he replied, referring to his duties as president. “I have tests every day. Everything I do. I’m not just campaigning, I’m running the world.”
In the president’s telling, everything is going — reasonably — well. If the debate was just a bad night, if his head is fine, if the polls are wrong and if his fellow party members are behind him, what chance is there of him passing the baton? “If the Lord Almighty came down and said, ‘Joe, get out of the race,’ I would get out of the race. The Lord Almighty is not going to come down,” Biden said in the interview when Stephanopoulos tried to steer him into the realm of hypotheticals.
Biden, a practicing Catholic, also resorts to the divine metaphor when asking for the vote: “Don’t compare me to the Almighty. Compare me to the alternative,” is one of his catchphrases. The alternative is Donald Trump, a convicted criminal charged with dozens of crimes whom Biden defines as a “congenital liar” and who he says has the “morals of an alley cat,” a candidate who did not accept his electoral defeat in 2020 and who runs the elections with authoritarian, xenophobic and racist messages. And yet, he is the favorite to win the presidential elections on November 5. The Republican has had the luxury of disappearing from the scene all week.
So far, Biden’s communications offensive has left a better impression than the debate — the bar was not set very high — but the president has continued to make mistakes in his interviews and rallies. Statements in which he says he was the first black vice president of the United States or that he will beat Trump again in 2020 quickly go viral and ruin the entire image-washing operation. In fact, in the ABC News interview itself there were some awkward pauses, confusing words and moments in which the president rambled on without finishing an argument.
Biden’s problem is not limited to the Atlanta debate. Voters already thought he was too old to be re-elected. He is the first octogenarian president in US history. The special counsel’s report in February, which described him as “a friendly, well-intentioned old man with a bad memory,” exonerated the president of criminal charges for his handling of classified papers, but at the cost of calling into question his ability. And even before then, the lapses, missteps and errors of the person under the greatest public scrutiny in the world were under scrutiny.
Biden has been winning elections for more than 50 years, ever since he was elected senator from Delaware in 1972, just before turning 30 years old, the age requirement to take the oath of office. He first entered the presidential primaries 35 years ago, in 1988. He failed that year and also in 2008, when Barack Obama rescued him for the vice presidency. When Obama leaned toward Hillary Clinton as his successor, he remained loyal and did not put up a fight. He bided his time in 2020, came back in the primaries when many had given him up for lost, and defeated Trump in November.
From what he says, he believes he can make a comeback. Perhaps he fears that the Democratic Party will enter into a fratricidal fight if he resigns. Perhaps he does not trust that Kamala Harris will be able to beat Trump. Perhaps he just wants to reassure himself to mark the time before a final plot twist. Biden has an appointment for a second debate with Trump on September 10. Before that, the Democratic convention, from August 19 to 22, must formally proclaim its candidates for president and vice president. The countdown is on. “There is a lot of time left in this campaign. There are more than 125 days left,” Biden said on Friday, when there were actually 123 days left. In this, too, he is optimistic.
Republican Ronald Reagan faced similar doubts before being elected as the oldest president to date. In 1980, at age 69, he pledged to resign if he perceived serious cognitive decline during his term. “If I were president and had even the slightest sense that my abilities had diminished before a second term came along, I would go,” he said. declared to The New York Times June 10, 1980. “For the same reason, I would resign as well.” In 1984, during his re-election campaign, at the age of 73, he had a bad first debate against the Democratic candidate, Walter Mondale, 56. In the second, in Kansas City, one of the moderators asked him about his age. “I want you to know that I am not going to use the age issue in this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, the youth and inexperience of my opponent,” Reagan replied, prompting laughter—including from Mondale—and applause. He swept the re-election.
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