The problems with having an 86-year-old US President

In the early 1990s heyday of Spitting Image, the satirical puppet show, High Court judges were portrayed as so ancient they came festooned in cobwebs. In one episode, three even sing a song called “We’re Guilty”. Its lyrics run: “We’re out of touch and out to lunch; Our brains have long retired! We’re senile, old and dribble; I think we should be fired!” Perhaps coincidentally the law was changed in 1993 to bring retirement age for judges down from 75 to 70.

Times have moved on. Today, 70 no longer seems ancient at all. And last year the retirement age for judges was pushed back up to 75. But even by such contemporary standards, US President Joe Biden – who began his stint in arguably the world’s most demanding job at 78 – is still well into his dotage. So this week’s news that he will seek re-election means that by the time a potential second term ends, he would be 86 – a figure to give not just satirists pause, but the rest of us too.

President Joe Biden with Kamala Harris and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Photo / AP

“I plan on running,” he told a celebrity weatherman live on television on Easter Monday, before adding, somewhat bizarrely, “but we’re not prepared to announce it yet.” Some nonplussed viewers may have wondered what else the president declaring he would run in full view of the TV cameras amounted to, if not an official announcement.

But that’s not how things work in Biden World. For Biden World is a place where America’s long-cultivated “strategic ambiguity” over Taiwan – neither confirming or denying it will come to the island’s aid in the event of a Chinese attack - can be blown in a single word: “commitment”. Where superpower showdown is sparked by a muddled demand that Putin be toppled in Moscow.

Where Scott Morrison, the name-escapes-me prime minister of Australia, becomes simply “that fellow Down Under”, our PM Rishi Sanuk [sic]; and Biden’s own vice-president – Kamala Harris – the “first lady” and the “president”. Perhaps that is why his determination to run is met with such incredulity.

“How many times does he have to say it for you to believe it?” Biden’s wife, Jill, said of her husband’s second-term ambitions on a trip to Africa in February.

She must know that the persistence of their disbelief is rooted not just in scepticism that a man who is openly mocked for his age by Donald Trump (“He can’t speak clearly. He can’t think clearly”) will be up to a job that involves so little sleep and so much responsibility half a decade from now. It is also based on historical precedent and objective medical misgivings.

Donald Trump openly mocks Joe Biden's age. Photo / AP

No matter that his latest physical check-up in February declared Biden “healthy, vigorous” and “fit” (as long as those words can apply to an 80-year-old with spinal arthritis and neuropathy, who looks and moves like an increasingly frail man). Voters are not reassured. Indeed, only a third of Democrats (and a fifth of all Americans) think Biden should run again, with worries about his age a major concern among those polled.

Biden is one of just four men to have been president in their 70s (with Eisenhower, Reagan, and of course, Trump). But last November he became the first octogenarian in the White House. And while America’s Constitution demands presidents are at least 35 years old, there is no upper age limit for elected holders of federal office. Yet when it comes to the noticeable decline in memory and thinking known as mild cognitive impairment (MCI), every year counts. America’s own Academy of Neurology estimates that just 8 per cent of those under 70 suffer from MCI. But a decade later, a quarter of people do. And above 85 – the age Biden would be at the end of his second term, it affects almost 40 per cent.

Of course, if Biden does choose to run, it would not be the first time age has been critical in an American presidential race. In 1984, Reagan, then 73, confessed he was “very tired” after a campaign debate. He could seem confused, hunting for words and failing to find them. In a TV showdown with his Democrat challenger, Walter Mondale, a comparatively spry 56, he told a story about a trip with his wife Nancy which seemed to drift aimlessly. Yet just like Biden today, Reagan cultivated an affable demeanour where rambling hardly seemed out of the ordinary, and which may have masked, for the casual voter, a more serious decline.

Years after he left the White House, it was revealed Reagan was suffering from Alzheimer’s, which eventually killed him 15 years after he left office in 2004. Inevitably, questions have since swirled about whether his presidency was marred by early signs of the disease. One of his sons, Ron, wrote in memoirs that he felt “the first shivers of concern” just three years into Reagan’s first term as president and that by the time of those re-election debates with Mondale, “my heart sank as he floundered his way through his responses”.

Ronald Reagan was suffering from Alzheimer’s, which eventually killed him. Photo / AP

Yet the irony is that debate performance is remembered for one of the all-time great lines in American politics, just as the subsequent election is remembered as one of the all-time crushing victories.

Asked if age meant he would crumble in a national security crisis, Reagan replied: “Not at all.”

Then with an actor’s timing, he added after a moment’s pause: “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.” He went on to win 49 of 50 states. Biden’s enemies take note.