No country for old presidents? Sleepy Joe and the midterms

“The Brits have their view. But they should be careful,” a US source told The Daily Telegraph after it was reported that Trump’s nickname for Biden, “Sleepy Joe”, is widely used in Downing Street. “What ’ s been said is offensive and he [President Biden] will remember it… He does bear grudges. Boris Johnson should know that.”

There are two striking things about this quote. First, the more we see of President Biden the less empathetic he has become. This is a huge surprise. When Biden ran for the presidency he seemed warm and kind, in striking contrast to Trump, perhaps the nastiest man to have served as president since the war. Then something changed. When he spoke about the collapse of the Afghan government and army, he lacked any graciousness or dignity. He just sounded plain nasty. Now there ’ s a White House source talking about how he bears grudges.

Second, I wouldn ’ t go on too much about President Biden ’ s memory (“he will remember it”) if I were working in the White House. During the fall of Afghanistan, he didn ’ t just come across as nasty, he came across as old and out of touch, bumbling, falling over his words. Then, when he recently met Israel ’ s new Prime Minister Naftali Bennett , photos made it look as if Biden had fallen asleep. Since then a video recording has been released which suggests he was not actually asleep, but bowing his head; one of Biden ’ s defenders argued that if you look closely you can see he “continues moving his fingers”. To be forced to prove that the President was awake during a meeting with the PM of one of America’s leading allies is not the answer. It is symptomatic of the problem.

This November Joe Biden will turn 79. He was born less than a year after Pearl Harbor. FDR was still President. He graduated from high school when Kennedy was in the White House . He was elected to the Senate the year of the Watergate break-in. Next year he will presumably be the first US President to turn 80 while still in office. 

There was a lot of talk about how old Ronald Reagan was when he was elected in 1980, about how he dyed his hair black to look younger and was photographed working out and riding on horseback to look energetic. But he was not yet 70 when he was elected, almost a decade younger than Biden.

FDR looks old in the history books. But he was barely 50 when he was elected for the first time and was much younger than Biden is now when he died during his fourth term of office. The black-and-white newsreel, along with his deteriorating health, make him look older than he actually was. His successor Harry Truman was not yet 60 when he succeeded Roosevelt in 1945.

There ’ s something else about FDR and Reagan. They were both hugely popular, perhaps the most popular American presidents of the 20th century. Americans don ’ t mind older presidents — within limits. FDR and Reagan were both a lot younger than Biden is now.

Of course, the most popular Democrat presidents since Truman were all young and much was made of their youth. Kennedy was 43 when he was elected, and it felt like a new start after the Eisenhower years (Eisenhower was 70 when he left office and he had been president from 1953-61). Bill Clinton was elected at 46 and made much of the famous photo of him as a youngster with JFK and playing the sax on Saturday Night Live. Obama was only a year older when he was first elected. In 2008 he ran against John McCain, white-haired and in his seventies, and in 2012 against Mitt Romney, then 65. Perhaps the most famous image of the 2020 presidential campaign was Obama playing basketball, lean, athletic, full of youthful vigour. Even LBJ was only 55 when he succeeded Kennedy and was only 61 when he left office. He looked older, but that ’ s what Vietnam did to him.

Biden, by contrast, simply looks and sounds old. He will be almost 80 by the midterm elections, which may well leave him a lame duck President for the rest of what will surely be his only term in office. As it is, he has a wafer-thin majority in the Senate. If he loses just one seat he will not be able to pass any major legislation. Nothing about gun control, free health care or immigration, nothing about Black Lives Matter or policing the inner cities. Even Kamala Harris, who looks so young next to Biden, will be 60 when the 2024 elections come round, almost 20 years older than Kennedy when he became President, almost 15 years older than Clinton and Obama. And her candidacy will be haunted by images of “Sleepy Joe ” (surely the most devastating description of any presidential candidate, devastating because it feels true).

Biden ’ s supporters say Afghanistan doesn ’ t matter to Middle America. He ’ s bringing the troops home, they say, and that ’ s what matters to southern and mid-West voters, where most soldiers come from. What matters to American voters, they say, is how he handles Covid and the economy. If he creates jobs that will win votes in the key Rust Bowl states like Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin which were so decisive in last year ’ s election.

Perhaps the optimists are right. But what about the photos of massacred women and children in Afghanistan, that one must fear will ensue? Or the enduring images of national humiliation, the helicopters and planes from Kabul airport, and the 13 servicemen and women killed in the last terrorist attack before American troops left? Biden ’ s supporters say he can speak to grieving American families because of his own experiences of loss. That seemed true in 2020. Now it sounds egotistical. At a certain point he will have to stop talking about his dead son Beau and his devastating experiences of loss, before they become debased by repetition. This sounds cruel, but if you had just lost your son or daughter in Kabul how consoled would you be by Biden talking again about his own dead son, when it was his decision to pull out of Afghanistan?

I was living in America when Carter lost to Reagan in 1980. The key image during that campaign was the hostage crisis in Iran. Americans don ’ t like national humiliation. The fall of Saigon and then then the hostage crisis, coming within a few years of each other, were devastating for Americans. Reagan spoke of a new vision of a strong, decent America, and won by eight-and-a-half million votes. Biden will have to create an awful lot of jobs in the next year to do well in the mid-terms. The President can only hope that American voters don ’ t have as good a memory as he apparently does and that he doesn ’ t look even older then than he does now.

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