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Today I came across this Jack Shafer column at Politico which argues, pretty convincingly, that there is really only one issue that matters to most people during the State of the Union speech. It isn’t Gaza or Ukraine or immigration or whatever laundry list of promises the White House has come up with for a 2nd Biden term. The only issue that matters tonight is Joe Biden’s age. That’s what everyone who watches will be scrutinizing.
Except for this year’s. Thanks to the stream of memory lapses that burble from the president’s lips like a Rocky Mountain stream, his stiff gait, his falls, his use of the shorter and sturdier set of stairs on Air Force One and even his own self-effacing jokes about his age, Biden has effortlessly attracted the volume of attention that makes him the envy of previous presidents. Unfortunately for Joe, it’s the wrong sort of attention because it makes him look infirm — veering into inept. And it’s happening right as the 2024 presidential campaign is on the verge of being set, as a rematch between Biden and Donald Trump.
The amount of media and social media scrutiny that the address will blast at Biden will likely exceed the power of a billion suns. His every handshake coming down the aisle, his every step taken, his every word spoken, will be magnified a hundred times over by the press, his political opposition and voters as they take his measure…
The Biden-is-too-old criticism has taken center stage in the campaign, much to the horror of media critics like Margaret Sullivan, who fretted last month in her Substack that the press was going to make Biden’s age the “overarching issue” of the campaign. Rather than dispelling the age issue, Sullivan’s column inspired even more discussion of Biden’s advanced years. You can protest all you want about it being wrong to reduce a presidential campaign to a single issue like this, but that’s ultimately up to the voters. And as a reminder, it’s not like this is the first time the question of age has been deployed in political maneuvering. The rap against Bob Dole in 1996 was that at 73, he was the oldest first-time presidential nominee and that, relative to incumbent Bill Clinton, he seemed to be lacking the stamina for such a grueling job. In 1972, when Biden first ran for Senate, he didn’t hesitate to capitalize on his youth and point out the age of the incumbent.
Reading this I thought about the immense pressure Biden is under to deliver (Biden apparently spent a couple days at Camp David to prepare) but also the immense pressure the White House is under to prep him for an event like this. It’s not just knowing the speech it’s delivering it with enough vim and vigor that he never once sounds like an old man who needs a nap. Maybe Biden just needs to load up on coffee but given the stakes there must be an enormous temptation to have the White House doctor give him a couple of caffeine pills with dinner.
