“Look at me,” President Biden said when asked — he’s asked a lot, now — whether he’s too old to serve a second term. He got his wish.
During the first three years of his administration, unlike the last president who was chaotic in his omnipresence, Mr. Biden remained a rarity. Now the smallest appearance brings a thousand remote diagnoses from armchair gerontologists. Major speeches, like the State of the Union address in March, are judged not for policy, but for fluency as the performance of the spoken word. A minor gaffe, like bungling one sentence at a public meeting in Philadelphia in April, dissected as possible evidence of decline.
They face the problem of image that the timing is right for everyone. Now the first presidential debate of 2024 is happening months earlier than usual, in part because the Biden campaign wants to address growing concerns that the president, at age 81, may not have four additional years of service. “Old age is not a war; old age is a massacre” – or so Philip Roth “Everyman” howled in 2006. Electorally, this year, maybe both.
The president is quite old, older than anyone who has ever held office. When he first won a Senate seat in 1972, the current leaders of Britain, France and Italy had not been born. If Mr. Biden serves a second term, he will retire to Delaware at the age of 86. Already, after three and a half years in a job that surpasses everyone, he looks like a different person than during the Covid campaign. his hair is thinner, his gait is tighter. His age may be just a few. But the understanding of his age has become very desperate with the connotation of old culture, formed over many centuries, handed down to us through religion and literature and art.
His predecessors and rivals are also old, and they also have trouble speaking clearly. But the same polls with Mr. Biden trailing 78-year-old Donald J. Trump, even after the latter’s conviction on 34 felony charges, show that only one of these men faces the widespread anxiety about the way all flesh is treated. . The main roadblock to an incumbent’s re-election, polls continue to tell us, isn’t policy. Younger Democrats, on both the left and the right, outnumbered him.
Greek dramatists, who knew how to depict democracy, liked to characterize the elderly with images of desiccation and disintegration. The kings become “dry”, the soldiers “dry”. These tragedies often feature a chorus of elderly citizens (in Aeschylus’ “Agamemnon,” in Sophocles’ “Oedipus the King”), who sing themselves as shadows, dreams, only half-substantial. When Mr. Biden’s limbs appear inflexible, as when he stepped out of a car in Paris this month, or when his eyes seem to flutter, as at a Juneteenth shindig on the South Lawn, the president is enveloped in the metaphor of his age. as a type of brittleness. The perception of mortality – that he is already thin, that he is fragile – can be more dangerous than the actual disability. Travel all the way to Kyiv during the war and you’ll still be following.
Then again, if the leader embodies or symbolizes the country, his age (or sometimes) may mean solidity, tradition, conviction. Konrad Adenauer, West Germany’s first chancellor, held the top job until he was 87; Election posters exaggerated jowls and wrinkles, projecting stability restored after the nightmare of 1933-45. Germany is known as a cunning power broker der Alteparents, and Biden married the same age and civil restoration during the 2020 campaign (he is also old).
When he yells at the State of the Union, or mocks the airmen with officers half his age, he is following this leader archetype. senex, like Nestor Homer, Pope Farnese Titian or Jedi Alec Guinness. Wise, maybe smart. Full of life, if possible long. But you can be seen as the father of the nation one day and as a doddering senior the next. In the realm of politics you seek justice in vain.
The problem is not capacity but picture capacity, and one can imagine a brutal contest on these terms. “The young rise when the old fall,” plans the traitorous Edmund in “King Lear.” But it bears repeating that there will be no intergenerational challenge in this week’s debate. Mr. Trump apparently dyed his hair when Mr. Biden left it white, but he also gave a physical stiffness and a verbal disturbance that – all the same – should not cause envy in a rival of only three and a half years. . (A few days ago, boasting that he had “aced” a cognitive test, Mr. Trump mentioned the name of his doctor, who is now a member of Congress.)
On the phone the feed is constantly refreshed, but the content remains the same – and in the two-party system with incumbency bias, this year the presidential rematch forms only the top layer of a larger collision of the old body and the new media. Senator Mitch McConnell, 82, the outgoing minority leader, froze in second place in recent pressers.
Senator Dianne Feinstein, who was 90 when she died in office last year, seemed unsure of where she was when the vote was called.
In the malaise of this gerontocrat, our political discourse has grown weak, thinning into a pathetic volley of real or confected seniors. Now a lot of it happens through selectively edited video clips, captioned for a pre-planned digital public, each insisting that your favorite leader is as crazy or sick as George III. When Mr. Biden was seen staring into space at this month’s G7 conference, at least in the 30-second footage distributed by the Republican campaign team and then by many news organizations, he was actually congratulating the paratroopers who arrived nearby. But linear news reporting, contextual broadcasting, is a relic of Mr. Biden’s century. Out-of-context clips are the cheapest, most lethal campaign ads, and no fake software is required.
There is nothing wrong with wanting your leader to be important, but do we only judge the fitness of a politician when we agonize over their shortcomings and mistakes? Or maybe we will ask for punishment for foreshadowing, in the old national body, the fate that awaits us all? In “Ran,” Akira Kurosawa’s grand 1985 epic samurai senescence, a Lear-like warlord believes that he can bend the world to his will one last time – but found, too late, that politics moves faster than he can keep up with. Succession plans go awry. A mighty battle ensued. The warlord wandered through the tall grass, his white hair flowing, and found himself now just another old man. “I’m lost,” said the old ruler. “Such is the human condition,” said the fool.
Video production by Ang Li and Caroline Kim.