POLITICS
After being depicted as an ‘elderly man with a poor memory,’ questions surrounding the president’s advanced years are dividing his party
JUST OVER A MONTH AFTER A SPECIAL COUNSEL report brought questions over Joe Biden’s age to the forefront of the 2024 presidential campaign, Democrats are torn about the best way of addressing what is becoming one of the election’s defining issues.
The president, 81, and his advisers struck back after Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report on February 8 depicted him as an “elderly man with a poor memory.”
Biden staged a rare evening press conference within hours. In the days that followed, Vice President Kamala Harris called the report “politically motivated,” and First Lady Jill Biden joined a chorus of surrogates vouching for Biden’s fitness and energy.
But as the president and his team have tried to move on from the damage caused by the report, White House allies and other Democrats have grown increasingly worried that the strategy of downplaying Biden’s age as a distraction is the wrong approach to an issue that can’t be easily swept under the rug.
While party insiders are privately fretting that Biden isn’t making a more forceful case for why he can serve as president well into his 80s, Democrats disagree over what the best message is to dispel the public’s fears about his age—and whether Biden or his surrogates are the most effective messengers.
The concerns and competing theories about Biden’s best path to winning reelection reflect the anxiety many Democrats feel about a general election rematch against former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee.
Biden’s historically low job approval numbers and lackluster showing in head-to-head polls against Trump have fueled increasingly intense chatter that Democrats would be better off picking someone else.
“Democrats have a better option than Biden,” Ezra Klein, a progressive columnist and vocal Trump critic, wrote in The New York Times soon after Hur’s report came out. Hur added more fuel to the fire by drawing attention to what polls show is one of Biden’s biggest vulnerabilities. “In a way, the special counsel did Biden a favor because some of us have been screaming aggressively from the sidelines that people who work with him on a regular basis need to come out and say” that he’s doing his job well, said a former senior Biden administration official who remains in contact with the White House and asked not to be named in order to speak candidly.
Despite growing calls for Biden and his surrogates to mount a more robust defense, there’s debate in the party about what that should look like.
Harris voiced the frustrations of White House and Biden campaign officials when she said Hur’s focu
