How Old is Too Old?
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How Old is Too Old?
In April 2023, Biden announced that he would run for a second term in the Oval Office. Practically in the next breath, he tried to take the inevitable age question off the table. He was blunt, “age doesn’t register with me.”
“They’re going to see a race, and they’re going to judge whether or not I have it or don’t have it.” He meant of course the voters. He continued, “I respect them taking a hard look at it. I’d take a hard look at it as well. I took a hard look at it before I decided to run.”
Biden well knew it would take more than his perfunctory dismissal of age as an issue in the campaign to make it go away. In November 2023, it was plopped back on the table by a seemingly unlikely source. That was former President Obama’s key advisor, David Axelrod, and a Democratic Party stalwart.
He caused a minor stir when he told an interviewer, “I think he has a 50-50 shot here, but no better than that, maybe a little worse. He thinks he can cheat nature here and it’s really risky.” Axelrod’s slap at Biden on the age issue drew a mix of criticism and agreement from a lot of Democrats.
Biden did not comment. However, there was little doubt that he was not unmindful of Axelrod and the repeated knocks of other Democrats
about his age. Yet, it was something that others worried about, but he wasn’t one of them. Close friends all agreed that he felt that if he was fit and healthy, he would continue to be politically active.
Biden though took no chances. In February 2023, he voluntarily released a medical report from November 2021 almost one year into his term that judged him as "healthy" and "vigorous" and said he was "fit to successfully execute the duties of the Presidency." The report was updated to February 2023. It found no change in his health and fitness.
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Biden had more than just his positive medical report to back up his contention that an eighty-year-old plus president was not at best a risk and at worst a clear and present danger. There was a virtual growth industry within the medical science industry that continually debunked many of the long-held myths about aging. One was the number of the aged. The numbers were getting larger and larger each year.
The World Health Organization (WHO) in a survey in 2020 on aging globally estimated that “Between 2000 and 2050, the proportion of the world’s population over sixty years would double from about eleven to twenty percent.”
More studies showed that there was no inherent inevitability of total mental and physical collapse due to age. It was also possible to reverse some of the most dreaded conditions routinely associated with aging. An
active lifestyle, healthy diet, and engagement if maintained were vital to sustaining good health.
That’s at any age. Some studies showed it could also peel back some of the aging process. Studies cited the increasing and popular use of cognitive training techniques and regular resistance-type exercises that could sharpen cognitive abilities and loss of muscle mass and bone density.
The number of those individuals aged sixty-plus in America was growing for a reason. More individuals were boosting their health by adopting a healthy diet, increasing regular exercise, and staying engaged in various activities. An added factor was how individuals saw the aging process.
If an individual viewed aging as a positive rather than as something to fear and dread, studies showed that he or she was far more likely to recover faster from a severe disability that might result from falls or other physical mishaps than an individual who was scared stiff of aging.
If an individual regarded aging as a natural part of life, without fear and worry, this measurably increased their physical and especially mental wellness. It was not solely a matter of mind over matter. A regular physical exercise regimen increased,” scientists concluded, “dynamic muscle strength, muscle size, and functional capacity.” It also reduced the risk of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia.
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This latter point that age in and of itself did not automatically put older persons in mortal danger of developing Alzheimer’s or dementia was
crucial to note. The drumbeat negative focus on Biden’s age was that he was virtually on the verge of dementia.
Typical was the reaction to Biden’s speech at a campaign reception in Manhattan in September 2023, a reporter cherry-picked this snippet from his talk, “So, I decided I would run. And it became — I ran because I thought everything this country stood for was up for grabs for the first time in my career.” The fact that Biden repeated that he would run in the same sentence was supposedly conclusive proof that this was a clear sign of dementia or Alzheimer’s.
The writer cited mental health experts who said that repeating words, phrases, or stories in a short time frame could be a potential sign of cognitive decline. To underscore the supposed evidence of Biden’s slipping into dementia the writer cited a handful of tweets from Twitter users,
“The gerbil on the wheel in his head died a long time ago. The wheel is rusting and collecting cobwebs.”
A third user commented, “It’s truly concerning how often he repeats himself word-for-word. I mean, is he even fit for office?”
A fourth user wrote, “That’s the first sign that I knew an aunt had Alzheimer’s. We had the same conversation every twenty minutes.”
It seemed ridiculous on the surface to dredge up Twitter users as the ultimate authorities on mental health issues. However, when the buzzwords
dementia and Alzheimer’s were attached to Biden by more than a few in the media and many top politicos, it made frightening sense.
The one obvious counter to Biden slipping into incoherence charge was seldom mentioned by many political analysts. That was Biden’s impressive legislative track record.
One commentator though did walk through the checklist of those achievements, “He passed a bipartisan $1 trillion infrastructure bill $1 trillion in November 2021 — a package that many Republicans are now touting as a success, even though they voted against it. He passed bipartisan gun control legislation in 2022, to the fury of the Republican base. And he negotiated a debt ceiling increase with minimal concessions, again infuriating Republican hard-liners.”
He drew the obvious conclusion from Biden’s legislative success story. Namely that someone who had badly lost their way mentally no matter how often he garbled a word or sentence could have even the remotest chance to pull that off.
The popular belief fed by much of the media was that dementia was an inevitable part of getting old. This was continually disproven by medical experts and in studies. The WHO study found that most older adults within and without the U.S. did not have and would not develop dementia.
The study further found that even an individual who showed signs of cognitive decline did not mean it would develop into full-blown dementia.
The key factors remained diet and exercise and continued engagement with others. This did much to slow down any cognitive impairment.
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Biden had a far bigger problem with the obsession the media, many Democrats, and much of the public had with his age. The issue was the widespread, and deeply ingrained belief that aging was a negative thing; something to approach and regard with terror.
By the start of Biden’s first term, there was a storehouse of studies that confirmed that older persons were fitter, more active, and had lost little of their capacity to still function at a high level, gerontologists even branded this the "longevity dividend." It didn’t matter. It did not shake the perception of many that an older person had lost zest and a positive outlook on life.
So, for Marc Sigel a medical director and conservative medical issues commentator, based on that mistaken popular belief about aging and zest lessness, Biden should have been required to take a cognitive test. His added source for making that demand was of all people, Trump, “ I agree with what President Trump told me during an interview at the White House in July 2020 — that those elderly individuals who would be president should take a cognitive test (as he said he had) as part of a routine physical.”
There was little doubt that Sigel wouldn’t be alone in shouting for Biden to submit to such an exam during the 2024 campaign. He and others had asked and answered the question “How old is too old?”
Their answer was that Biden was just that “too old.” The real question, though, was that objective medical science or partisan politics talking?
