By Herbert W. Stupp
Sunday, August 20, 2023
President Biden has declared himself a candidate for
reelection in 2024 and, by his modest standards, has begun campaigning. Surveys
and person-on-the-street interviews suggest that Americans do not want him to
run again. Indeed, 68 percent of registered voters believe he is “too old” to
run for president, according to an ABC News/Washington Post survey.
Most observers, and my own eyes and ears, tell us there
is something wrong with our president, as he blathers that we can “lick the
world,” to cite one recent gaffe in Ireland. But is that a by-product of
turning 80, as Mr. Biden did in November?
Not necessarily.
As then-mayor Rudy Giuliani’s commissioner on ageing for
eight years, I managed services for luckless victims of Alzheimer’s disease and
physical maladies but also oversaw programs to provide recreation, lifelong
learning, physical fitness, cultural offerings, meals, and other resources for
active, mentally alert older New Yorkers.
Older people continue to be a source of volunteerism,
caregiving, wisdom, sound values, and, yes, leadership, experience, and
manpower. Look at the public-safety councils, charitable organizations, and
many businesses in your community, and you’ll notice hair that is white, gray,
or receding.
Each year at the nation’s largest Department for the
Aging, we honored “Ageless Achievers,” older men and women who were examples
for all generations in their energy, brilliance, commitment, and
accomplishments. I am thinking of an immigrant Park Avenue law-firm
founder who learned English and led an international law firm into his mid
90s. Another was a conservationist who, also in her 90s, helped to save
Udall’s Cove in Queens, along with its important wetlands.
Along with nonagenarians completing marathons and winning
tennis tournaments, how about our late former U.S. senator and federal
appeals-court judge James L. Buckley, who lived to be 100 and wrote books about
reforming Congress in his 90s? Henry Kissinger, the former U.S. secretary of
state, turned 100 this spring and is actively working on his next
book.
Last month, at the National Senior Games in Pittsburgh,
there were 50- and 100-meter-dash races for people in the 90-99 age
group!
So what about Joseph Biden?
Clearly, something is wrong, though as happens when a
person’s cognition is in decline, he has bad days and some better ones. But if
age is the metric by which we judge someone’s ability to lead, what is the
excuse for our vice president’s featherbrained word salads? She is 58 and
should be in her political prime to everyone except Don Lemon.
During my years heading the city’s Department for the
Aging, I was privileged to know and work with Dr. Robert Butler, the Pulitzer
Prize–winning author of Why Survive? Being Old in America. He created and
chaired the nation’s first hospital geriatric unit, at Mount Sinai Hospital in
New York, and declared that “senility is not inevitable with aging but is,
instead, a consequence of disease.”
Butler observed that “older leaders often play extraordinary
roles in stabilizing countries in crisis.” Think West Germany’s
Adenauer, South Africa’s Mandela, France’s de Gaulle, and Chiang Kai-shek of
free China and then Taiwan.
When Pope Benedict XVI cited “advanced age” as a primary
reason for his surprise papal retirement in 2013, I thought those words could
lead to discrimination against others simply for reaching certain milestones of
longevity. I have the same apprehensions about linking Biden’s shortcomings to
his being 80.
An article by the New York Post’s Carl
Campanile reveals that ageism is rife in New York City. Among younger
respondents to a city-sponsored survey, “one-third of younger respondents said
seniors are too old to do certain things,” while another 29 percent of the same
respondents said “seniors shouldn’t be allowed to work.” A city official
referred to these views as “hostile ageism.”
If our president is “too old” for the job or even for a
campaign, I am concerned that perhaps the 65-year-old manager, the 70-year-old
surgeon, the teacher with decades of experience in the classroom, or even the
50-year-old firefighter will be judged as too old, even if they are as focused
and spry as ever.
Yes, some diseases and disorders become more likely as we
live longer. But the obsession with mere age sells tens of millions of
capable older and even some middle-aged people way too short.
In 1900, life expectancy at birth in America stood at age
47. Despite some retrenchment due to Covid, average longevity improved to 79 in
recent years. If indeed the first person to live to 150 has already been born,
it is more than plausible that before the end of this century, the nation might
see a cogent president over 100, a nimble 105-year-old running Apple, and
perhaps astronauts in their 90s.
President Biden should be judged, instead, on his
lavishly wasteful federal spending (fanning calamitous inflation), incompetent
appointees, a daily catastrophic invasion of unvetted migrants, waffling on the
world stage, high taxes, avalanches of fentanyl, busybody regulation,
burgeoning scandals, and his working to make elections less secure and
reliable, among many other failures.
Sure, Biden is diminished, but not because of mere
longevity. As Mark Twain counseled us, “Age is a question of mind over
matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”
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