Joe Biden after tea-time is like Henry Fonda in ‘On Golden Pond’
President Joe Biden appeared at a press conference Tuesday.
He only schedules events between the hours of 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., according to Axios.
The press conference took place at 6 p.m. It was one of only 13 public appearances he’s made after his tea-time “lid.”
Here’s what we learned: Joe Biden after 4 p.m. looks like a movie star.
The problem is the movie star he looks like is Henry Fonda in “On Golden Pond.”
Fonda won an Oscar for that movie, in which he played a crotchety old man whose body and mind are failing him.
He was 76 years old. Biden is 80.
Fonda was sick when he made the movie and died a few months after the Oscars.
Biden isn’t sick, as far as we know. He’s just old. Very old.
It wasn’t that Biden was substantively terrible at the press conference. He hit the points he wanted to hit.
But it was hard to watch. His voice was hoarse and halting, and his overall cadence was that of someone who simply doesn’t have the jaw and tongue strength the once-logorrheic Biden possessed — to a fault.
There’s a term for this: “dysarthria.” It’s not a disease. It’s a marker of natural degeneration.
I don’t use the word “degeneration” in any moral sense, simply as a description of what happens to our bodies as we age.
Dysarthria is normal for an 80-year-old man. It’s just not normal for us to have an 80-year-old man as our president.
And Americans feel it, even after 51% of them elected him president — and no matter how they feel about his job performance so far.
Two polls this week show divergent American opinions of how Biden’s done.
One, conducted by The Washington Post and ABC News, has him at 36% approval.
The other, by Yahoo and YouGov, puts him at 43%. That’s not great, but it’s 20% better than the other one.
Here’s the thing, though: Both polls have almost identical results when it comes to how Americans view his age and his cognitive abilities.
WaPo/ABC reports that only 32% believe he has the “mental sharpness” needed for the presidency, with 33% saying he “is in good enough physical health” to serve.
Almost two-thirds of those Yahoo and YouGov surveyed express worries about his “mental and physical acuity.”
And once those Yahoo/YouGov polled are told Biden will be 82 at the time of next year’s election and 86 at the end of what might be his second term, 64% of them say he is “too old for another term as president.”
WaPo/ABC found 68% believe he’s too old for another term.
And this is how they feel about him in May 2023, with almost 18 months to go until Election Day 2024.
If things go swimmingly in America from now until New Year’s, Biden has nothing to fear in his pursuit of his party’s nomination.
But if the degeneration continues and things aren’t great, the presumption that he’ll have smooth sailing to the Democratic nod will be revisited. History says as much.
With no questions raised about his mental fitness and only three years after winning the biggest landslide in American history, Lyndon Johnson found himself with a serious challenger in the New Hampshire primary in 1968.
He won there — but he saw the writing on the wall and announced he would not seek a second term.
In November 1979, Edward Kennedy decided to launch a primary challenge to Jimmy Carter.
The sitting president eventually prevailed, but not before Kennedy had won 12 states.
Would Democrats have fared better in 1980 had Carter not been the nominee?
We’ll never know, but the Reagan landslide didn’t just push Carter out: Republicans won an astonishing 12 seats in the Senate and took control of that body for the first time in 26 years.
Do Democrats want to risk not only the presidency but a blowout in Congress with an infirm Biden at the top of the ticket in 2024?
They do not have to answer this question now. But they may have to confront it in the fall.
One thing is epistemologically certain: Joe Biden will not get younger between now and then.
And the American people never elected Henry Fonda.
