World watches Biden health closely amid frailty concerns
“With Bush it was dumb. With Obama it was elitist. With Clinton it was womaniser ... but obviously Biden's Achilles' heel is that he's old.”
Paul Begala, a Democratic strategist
President Joe Biden is not a morning person. On his daily public schedule, there are vanishingly few events and briefings planned before 9am, and most of his meetings take place in the early afternoon, usually after his preferred lunch of soup and salad.
Biden’s public workday, which is at times thinly scheduled, was once considered part of an attempt to live a normal life at the same time as being ruler of the free world: working out in the morning at the gym, walking to the White House, coming home to dinner with his wife, Jill, at 7pm, talking to his grandchildren on the phone.
Yet as concerns rise over Biden’s age and mental acuity before the November presidential election, his seemingly easygoing schedule has added to the perception that he is frail, low-energy, and will be unable to rule for another four-year term.
With no obvious Democratic candidate hiding in the wings, the world is watching Biden’s every move. Any serious health concern later in the election campaign could risk handing the presidency to the Republican challenger Donald Trump. With wars raging in Gaza and Ukraine, a rogue Iran waging proxy skirmishes in the Middle East and looming competition from China, this would have dramatic consequences for the direction of the free world.
Last week, the debate over Biden’s fitness to govern exploded after the release of a report by Trump-appointed special counsel Robert Hur which cleared him of illegally keeping classified documents at his home, but included an instantly memorable description of the president as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”, and claimed that he did not remember “even within several years” when his son Beau died.
In the aftermath, Biden called a press conference, forcefully denouncing the accusations, dismissing them as a political hit job and insisting that he was just as sharp as ever. As he was about to leave, however, he momentarily mixed up Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi with the leader of Mexico. Earlier in the week he’d confused the late French president Francois Mitterrand with Emmanuel Macron, and Helmut Kohl, who died in 2017, with former German chancellor Angela Merkel.
The string of gaffes, and the accusations in the report, have brought into sharp relief Biden's greatest weakness: his age and perceived dodderiness, and deepened the suspicion that Biden’s public appearances are being limited to hide his increasing frailty.
At 81, Biden is already the oldest president in American history. Should he win another term, he’ll lead until he's 86. With Trump, who is less than four years younger, as a presumptive challenger, the US is looking down the barrel of another four years with an octogenarian ruler.
“For any politician, an event that confirms the negative narratives people have about them is problematic,” said Paul Begala, a Democratic strategist and former adviser to Bill Clinton. “Every politician has that. With Bush it was dumb. With Obama it was elitist. With Clinton it was womaniser ... but obviously Biden's Achilles’ heel is that he’s old, so of course this hurts him.”
A dearth of public appearances has compounded these concerns. The president would usually sit for a television interview ahead of today’s Super Bowl, a tradition since the Obama Administration. But this year, for the second year in a row, Biden declined to take part. According to the White House Transition Project, he has sat for a quarter as many interviews as Trump at this stage of his presidency, and a fifth as many as Obama.
The White House has said this simply reflects the changing media environment, and that the president engages more directly with voters on social media, or by doing softball interviews with actors and influencers. But now that Biden’s every public appearance is combed for signs of mental and physical frailty, his reticence in engaging with the press has been lambasted by Republicans as a sign that his aides are hiding him from scrutiny.
Trump, 77, who himself spent much of his presidency playing golf, makes similar blunders. He recently mixed up Nikki Haley - his stalling rival for the Republican nomination - and Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the US House of Representatives. He has repeatedly said he’s running against Barack Obama, rather than Biden, and claimed that the current president could “plunge the country into World War II”.
When he was president, his schedule often included long periods set aside for “executive time”, which according to a 2019 report by Axios usually meant watching television, reading the papers and calling his contacts. He rarely got to the Oval Office before 11am.
“Most people can’t quite believe that [Biden] is even thinking about running again, and they certainly don’t like the idea that he’s one of their only two choices to be president of the United States,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster. “The other one is facing 91 felony counts. It’s like the vast majority of Americans are going, ‘wait a minute, in a country of 330 million people, are these choices the best we can do’?”