Joe Biden will never be younger than he is right now. He won’t be in better physical condition next year, and his mental acuity won’t get any better in a year, let alone in four. Time only moves in one direction, and it can be unkind.
But his age isn’t the real issue — it’s his ability to function. You don’t need a medical degree to know that President Biden is both physically and mentally frail. You can tell that he’s got problems by the way he walks (that slow shuffle) and how he talks (haltingly, as if he’s not sure what he’s trying to say). You can tell by the way he confuses the president of Egypt with the president of Mexico; by the way he mixes up the leaders of France and Germany with previous leaders who have long been dead; by how a reporter reminded him that Israel wasn’t simply fighting some unnamed “opposition,” as Biden put it, but was in a war with Hamas, a name he couldn’t seem to remember.
Yet Democrats are outraged over Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report and those now famous words, that the president is a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” a man who has a “diminished faculties in advancing age.” It’s one reason Hur chose not to charge Biden in connection with his possession of classified material.
Partisans on the left — both in and out of the media — are calling Hur’s remarks outrageous and gratuitous. Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post said they were politically motivated, that Hur was a “rock-ribbed Republican” who was echoing “GOP campaign smears.”
But it’s not only Republicans who believe Biden is too weak to serve four more years. Polls have been telling us that a vast majority of Americans think the same thing. But now we have a new ABC/Ipsos poll that finds that a staggering 86 percent of Americans think Biden is too old to serve another term — and that includes 73 percent of Democrats and 91 percent of independents. Having 86 percent of Americans agree on anything is a near impossible task — and that includes whether they believe that Mother’s Day is a good idea.
Democrats may howl over what they say was a cheap shot by a Republican prosecutor, but, like just about everybody else, they know the president is not in good shape. And if they’re really angry (and not just reflexively covering for the nominal leader of their party), their beef isn’t with Robert Hur, it’s with the American people.
Even David French at the New York Times, a columnist who (to put it mildly) is no fan of Donald Trump, warns Democrats that Joe Biden is in trouble. “I can know,” he writes, “that Biden would be far better than Trump and still be concerned that he’s not up to the challenge of governing for four more years. ‘Better than Trump’ doesn’t mean that he’d continue to respond to profound foreign and domestic challenges with clarity and energy. ‘Better than Trump’ doesn’t mean we can count on him finishing a second term. ‘Better than Trump’ doesn’t even necessarily mean that he can beat Trump in November.”
It’s true that none of this talk about Biden’s frailties makes Joe Biden look good, but instead of trashing Hur, let’s be counterintuitive and suggest that Democrats should actually be thanking him. What if all this new attention on Biden’s mental health becomes a tipping point and convinces him (or his wife) that he should step aside and let someone else run against Trump, the likely GOP nominee? If that happens, Biden would go out a hero, at least as far as his fellow Democrats are concerned, because anyone not named Joe Biden almost certainly would have a better chance — a much better chance — of winning in November.
And there’s a graceful way for Biden to leave the race. He could stay in through the primaries and, at his party’s national convention in August, he could release his delegates and let them decide whom they want to oppose Trump. He could go out as the gracious elder statesmen who beat Trump once and helped beat him a second time.
Bette Davis once said that getting old “ain’t for sissies.” So there’s no shame in acknowledging the obvious: that it’s time for Biden to step aside and let his party’s convention delegates pick the nominee to run against Trump.
But Biden’s campaign team may figure that if they keep their candidate under wraps (as they did when he ran from his basement in Delaware in 2020) — no town halls, no Super Bowl interview, as few off-the-cuff remarks as possible — they can win again, counting on Donald Trump to say enough stupid things between now and November to defeat himself.
That might work, save for one thing: When 86 percent of the American people believe Biden is too old to serve another term, even Trump may look good by comparison.
That’s something Joe Biden may want to consider. The legacy he cares so much about is on the line.
Bernard Goldberg is an Emmy and an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University award-winning writer and journalist. He was a correspondent with HBO’s “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel” for 22 years and previously worked as a reporter for CBS News and as an analyst for Fox News. He is the author of five books and publishes exclusive weekly columns, audio commentaries and Q&As on his Substack page. Follow him @BernardGoldberg.