The Media Belatedly Discover Biden’s Age Problem

By Noah Rothman

Friday, September 08, 2023

 

Last Friday’s Washington Week with The Atlantic on PBS might as well have been broadcast a year ago — a time when the press was still dedicated to debunking the notion that President Joe Biden was anything other than fit, cogent, and capable.

 

Why is it that no one brings up Donald Trump’s age as a demerit against his candidacy, Politico’s Kyle Cheney asked rhetorically. When pressed to answer his own question, he blamed the “years of concerted effort” by Republicans to inject into the public consciousness a narrative “weaponizing Biden’s age against him.” Though Cheney did allow that Trump has “a different demeanor” about him, the Atlantic’s Mark Leibovich went a step further in his condemnation of the GOP. “It’s not just making an issue of Biden’s age, it’s lying,” he added. “It’s saying he’s senile, saying he’s demented, saying he’s out of it.” “Right,” the magazine’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, concurred. “Mentally, he’s quite acute.”

 

This pristine example of what was once standard operating procedure is downright quaint now, all of one week later. The publication of a Wall Street Journal poll this week has put the fear of God into Biden’s allies. Seventy-three percent of voters believe Biden is too old to seek a second term, including two-thirds of self-described Democrats. Thirty-six percent think he is mentally unfit to serve as president right now. More registered voters believe Donald Trump has a vision for the future, a strong record of accomplishments, and even “cares about people like you” than believe the same about Biden.

 

The reporters who assigned blame for the widespread but false notion that Biden is physically and mentally unfit for the presidency to Republican chicanery were speaking for the Beltway, not for voters on either side of the aisle. With that, something snapped. All of a sudden, the press pivoted to a full-bore assault on Democratic officeholders who have tethered their party’s fortunes to its rickety, octogenarian figurehead.

 

 “Does the Democratic Party need to start seriously looking at someone else?” CNN host Erin Burnett asked Representative Katie Porter. “[Nikki] Haley has argued that a vote for Biden would really end up being a vote for Vice President Kamala Harris,” her CNN colleague, Jake Tapper, noted in an exchange with Representative Cedric Richmond. “Do you not acknowledge that the perception of his frailty, perceived frailty, is hurting his campaign, is hurting his reelection chances?” While recording an upcoming interview with California governor Gavin Newsom, NBC News’ Chuck Todd asked Newsom to ponder a hypothetical in which Biden “doesn’t run,” goading him to affirm that he would at that point be “a likely candidate” for the White House. “But even Democrats are worried about the president’s age,” CBS host Margaret Brennan informed Vice President Harris. “The Wall Street Journal had a poll showing two-thirds of Democrats say Joe Biden is too old to run again. Are you prepared to be commander in chief?”

 

From an anxious Democrat’s perspective, none of these questions produced a satisfying answer. Porter pivoted away from the question she was asked toward the notion that Biden has “a terrific story to tell on the economy.” “Voters will see his vigor,” Richmond told Tapper. “President Biden is going to run,” Newsom assured Todd. And to the question of whether Harris was at all capable of succeeding the president, she responded unreassuringly, “Yes I am, if necessary.”

 

Democrats are almost certainly stuck with Biden as their 2024 nominee, but that might not have been the case if the kind of hand-wringing this Journal poll has inspired had begun months ago. Could Democrats and their allies in America’s newsrooms have nudged or even muscled Biden out of office? A president who wants to remain president is extremely difficult to dislodge from office. But it’s not impossible to imagine a popular groundswell in which the press, backed by supermajorities of Democrats, had successfully applied all its leverage with the aim of convincing Biden to bow out at the end of his first term.

 

Why this one WSJ poll has lit such a fire under the press is similarly inexplicable. It’s not as though the data it produced are especially unique. Polling of a Biden–Trump rematch in 2024 has been tight for months. The vast majority of Democrats have been telling pollsters consistently for over a year that they do not want Biden as their party’s 2024 nominee. Conservatives have not been the only Americans to notice Biden’s obvious and worsening decrepitude. Bipartisan majorities have been telling anyone willing to listen that they believe the president is unfit to serve a second term, and they’ve been saying it for well over a year.

 

If these data registered with the press, that understanding was subordinated to the imperative on display in last week’s terribly ill-conceived Washington Week segment. To give Republicans even one inch on the issue of Biden’s fitness is to advance the GOP’s political prospects and, by extension, Donald Trump’s. It was therefore necessary not to describe the sky as blue, but to allege that Republicans are merely retailing the narrative that the sky is blue — an allegation laden with the sordid implication that Republicans want the sky to be blue.

 

It’s all too late now, of course. But it didn’t have to be. If the imperative to avoid ratifying the observational judgments rendered by Republicans hadn’t prevailed over the media’s job to describe accurately the contours of our shared environment, Democrats might not now find themselves in their current predicament. But no one seems inclined to depart from their assigned roles even as we careen ever nearer to a presidential election that will produce one of two unacceptable outcomes.