President Joe Biden’s biggest obstacle in this year’s presidential race is, ironically, himself.
While the Republican front-runner, former President Donald Trump, is a tenacious foe who curiously seems energized by relentless campaigning rather than exhausted by it, he is no match for Biden’s man in the mirror.
And unfortunately for the president and his Democratic Party, the obstacle he faces is rather immovable.
At 81, Biden is the oldest president to ever run for re-election. If he is successful, he will be 86 years old when his second term is finished.
The topic of age goes beyond the actual number and includes issues associated with aging.
Trump is 77 — only four years younger than Biden. Yet the mental acuity demonstrated seems to separate the two men by a much larger distance.
During the honeymoon period of Biden’s presidency, his odd statements and mix-ups were described as “gaffes” — and there were many. But now they are commonplace, coupled with blank looks of confusion, mumblings and shuffling.
For many Americans, the scenes playing out on television before their eyes are reminiscent of personal experiences of family members or friends suffering from mental decline. The hallmarks are recognizable and unmistakable.
This bitter fact has one of the most famous American pollsters calling for Democrats to “adjust to the new reality.”
Should Biden resign?
Nate Silver, who founded FiveThirtyEight and does not identify as right-leaning, added his voice to the chorus of alarming observations of Biden in a post to his Substack page on Monday, asking the president to either solidly reassure the American people he is up for the job or “stand down.”
“Biden is probably a below-replacement-level candidate at this point because Americans have a lot of extremely rational concerns about the prospect of a Commander-in-Chief who would be 86 years old by the end of his second term,” he wrote in his analysis on the Silver Bulletin. “It is entirely reasonable to see this as disqualifying.”
Extremely rational indeed.
An ABC News/Ipsos poll published last week revealed that an overwhelming 86 percent of Americans believe Biden is too old to serve a second term.
The poll was conducted after the Feb. 8 release of a report by special counsel Robert Hur on the president’s mishandling of classified documents that said Biden would not be charged with a crime in part because he “would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Bewilderingly, Biden decided to contradict those findings by having an impromptu evening press event that same day — an odd move considering he is usually done for the day by late afternoon.
The event had the exact opposite effect the president hoped for. The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro called it “the most catastrophic press conference of all time” on his podcast. Silver noted in his Monday post that Biden “confused the names of the leaders of Egypt and Mexico and was defiant with reporters in a way that — yes, this latter part is subjective — I doubt many impartial observers would say came across well.”
If the main disadvantage Biden faces in his re-election bid is his aging, then the perception of him will continue to wane as time goes by.
With Trump leading in the polls — he’s ahead of the president by 1.1 percent in the latest RealClearPolitics averages — Silver concluded Biden is “losing now and there’s no plan to fix the problems other than hoping that the polls are wrong or that voters look at the race differently when they have more time to focus on it.”
Both candidates are getting older, but Biden can’t afford to age much more.
