WASHINGTON — People in their 80s lead countries, create majestic art and perform feats of endurance, one even scaling Mount Everest. It’s soon time for Joe Biden, who turns 80 today, to decide whether he has one more mountain to climb — the one to a second term as president.
Questions swirl now about whether he’s got what it takes to go for the summit again.
The oldest president in U.S. history, Biden hits his milestone birthday at a crossroads, as he and his family face a decision on whether he should announce for reelection.
Biden aides and allies say he intends to run. Yet the president himself can sound equivocal. “My intention is that I run again,” he said at a news conference this month. “But I’m a great respecter of fate.”
“We’re going to have discussions about it,” he said. Aides expect those conversations to pick up over the holidays, with no decision until 2023.
To observe Biden at work is to see a leader tap a storehouse of knowledge built up over a half century in public office as he draws on deep personal relationships at home and abroad, his mastery of policy and his familiarity with how Washington works — in short, the wisdom of the aged.
But to observe Biden is also to see him walk now often with a halting gait.
It is to see him take a pass on a formal dinner with other leaders without a real explanation, as happened on his trip abroad last week. Some supporters wince when he speaks, hoping he gets through his remarks OK.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision, at age 82, to pull back from leadership and let a new generation rise may spill over into Biden’s thinking and that of his party as Democrats weigh whether they want to go with a proven winner or turn to the energy of youth.
Among the questions that Pelosi’s move raises, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, an authority on political communications at the University of Pennsylvania: “Even if one is highly competent and successful, is there a point at which one should step aside to give others the opportunity to lead?”
She said: “Pelosi’s decision makes such questions more salient in the context of Biden’s 2020 statement that he was the bridge to a new generation of leaders.”
Biden’s verbal flubs have been the stuff of legend throughout his five-decade political career, so sussing out the impact of age on his acuity is a game for “armchair gerontologists,” as Dr. S. Jay Olshansky, an aging expert, puts it.
In the distorted mirrors of social media commentary, every slip is magnified into supposed proof of senility. A moment of silent reflection by Biden is presented as the president nodding off.
Some allies see Biden’s blunders as an increasing vulnerability.
In an AP VoteCast survey of the electorate this month, 58 percent of voters said he does not have the mental capability to serve effectively as president. That was a grim picture of the present, not just looking ahead to another potential term.
Before the 2020 election, Olshansky, at the University of Illinois Chicago, published a paper that predicted both Biden and Republican rival Donald Trump were bound to maintain their good health beyond the end of this presidential term.
Nothing has changed Olshansky’s mind.
“While 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.”
Biden is already in the club of high achievers for people his age. Unlike 92 percent of people 75 and older in the U.S., he still has a job. And he says he begins most days with an 8 a.m. workout.
“If I let it go for a week, I feel it,” Biden told the “Smartless” podcast.
White House aides say Biden reads his briefing book deep into the night, holds intensive evening meetings with advisers and doesn’t balk at scheduling requests that may have him out late.
