After all, he asked supporters and friends whether he was too old to run last year when contemplating his campaign. As long as his doddering and meanderings don’t exceed his par on the course, Biden obviously hopes to attribute flubs to his nature, not his age.īiden can’t complain too much about people fussing over his age. “I am a gaffe machine,” Biden acknowledged in December 2018 during a book tour. That was a twofer: Roosevelt wasn’t president in 1929, and White House television broadcasts were not yet a thing.īiden has further indemnified himself from his loopiness by embracing it.
Roosevelt went on TV after the great stock market crash. During the same campaign, he claimed that “jobs” is a three-letter word and introduced his running mate as “Barack America.” In an interview with CBS News that year, he said Franklin D. Chuck Graham to stand up at a rally so the crowd could see him. During the 2008 presidential campaign, he asked Missouri state Sen. But his career-long reputation of gaffeing in public indemnifies him from the charges that he has just now gone addle-pated.
Other politicians of a certain age would be punished by voters and the press if they were as consistently loopy as Biden. Was he rusty on the debate stage, Washington Post columnist Karen Tumulty asked, or bewildered at finding himself there? Was it a minor slip of the tongue when he told debate viewers to “go to Joe30330” instead of “text JOE to 30330,” or does he not know how texting works? Were Biden’s debate comebacks tellingly “slow off the mark,” as the New York Times put it, or did he consciously decide the best way to fend off Kamala Harris and Cory Booker’s punches was to rope-a-dope? The press corps’ refusal to resolve the question has made Biden’s age and his state of mental and physical fitness the primary lens through which it views his candidacy. The greater press taboo, it seems, isn’t asking the question about Biden but answering it. But after tallying Biden’s repeated stumbles, miscues and mental lapses, journalists tend to retreat from calling Biden too infirm to run the White House.
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