The 80-year-old president once bristled at questions about his age. Now he delivers the quips himself.
And now, as the 80-year-old incumbent president begins his fourth and final presidential campaign, he once again is turning toward questions of his age. But where he once was defensive, now he tries to be good-humored. Where he once rebuffed questions about being the oldest president and any accompanying suggestions of frailty, now he embraces them and argues that with age comes wisdom.
To follow the arc of Biden is to follow a man talking about his age in different ways as he enters the different stations of life. As he begins his ninth decade — when he is already the oldest president in history, with many voters voicing concern about a president who would be 86 at the end of a second term — Biden has increasingly attempted to suggest that he is not the butt of the joke — he is in on it.
He repeatedly invokes his old age at fundraisers, White House events, dinners, sermons — even when speaking to astronauts preparing for a mission to the moon.
He has jokingly listed his age as “a little under 103” or “198 years old” or — apparently when feeling spry — “34 years old.” He claims he graduated high school “300 years ago,” or to have had a “career of 280 years.” He’s been buddies with the Founding Fathers.
“I believe in the First Amendment — not just because my good friend Jimmy Madison wrote it,” he said at the annual dinner of the White House Correspondents’ Association in April.
The lightheartedness is a new approach for Biden, who during his 2020 campaign could grow prickly over questions about his age.
When reporters asked him if he would release his medical records, he brusquely rebuffed the question. “Why, you want to wrestle?” he demanded.
During an event in Iowa, a farmer bluntly questioned his age, telling the then-77-year-old candidate, “I’m 83, and I know damn well I don’t have the mental faculties I did 30 years ago.”
“I’m not sedentary,” Biden said, growing angry. “You want to check my shape, man, let’s do push-ups together here, man. Let’s run. Let’s do whatever you want to do. Let’s take an IQ test. Okay?”
Eventually he settled on a consistent answer to the question, saying that it was legitimate to ask about his age but imploring voters, “Watch me.”
While they were watching, though, sometimes he has stumbled, quite literally. He fell off his bike last year, slipped on the steps of Air Force One, and last month tripped over a sandbag. To be sure, each incident could easily have befallen someone decades younger; but just as easily, they were cast by skeptics as further evidence of frailty.
Biden in some ways is taking a lesson from Ronald Reagan who, until Biden’s tenure, had been the nation’s oldest president. When Reagan turned 70 during his first term, it became a spectacle at the White House, with parties and cakes, as Reagan joked, “I want to thank you for starting out the celebration of my 31st anniversary of my 39th birthday.”
At 73, Reagan was challenged about his age in a 1984 presidential debate, famously shooting back, “I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” The riposte did not answer the question, but in the eyes of many political analysts, it was the moment that sealed his advantage over the 56-year-old Walter Mondale.
Biden, for his part, reacted almost with disbelief as he marked his 80th birthday. “Somebody said my birthday is coming up,” he said as the event approached last November. “And I said, ‘No, that must be somebody else.’”
When he was asked separately during a radio interview what an 80-year-old Biden would tell a 50-year-old Biden, he immediately responded, “That I’m still 50!”
“I can’t even say that number, 80,” he added. “I’m serious. I no more feel that than I’d get out from behind this desk and fly.”
Biden has often told a story about Satchel Paige, the baseball player who pitched a winning game at age 47 and was approached by reporters afterward.
“They come in and said, ‘Satch, no one’s ever pitched a win at age 47. How do you feel about pitching a win on your birthday?’” Biden told Pope Francis last year, according to video of the event. “And he looked at them and he said, ‘Boys, that’s not how I look at age. I look at it this way: How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you were?’”
Biden then looked at the Pope, who at 86 is nearly six years older Biden. “You’re 65, I’m 60,” he said. “God love ya.”
Throughout much of his career, Biden has turned his eyes to the start of his political life — the moment when he was a young star with a limitless horizon, one of the youngest senators in American history after his election at age 29.
“I know I look like I’m only still 29,” he said recently. “But I’ve been around a long time. And as one of my friends said, “Just try — try to connect age and wisdom.’”
Increasingly, that is his more serious answer to the relentless questions about age. Sometimes he grows reflective, musing that his longevity is an asset, providing experience, steadiness and even sagacity as an unstable political landscape rages around him.
“The only thing I bring to this career after my aged — as you can see how old I am — but is a little bit of wisdom,” he told the Irish parliament in April. “I come to the job with more experience than any president in American history. It doesn’t make me better or worse, but it gives me few excuses.”
At times, he has also grown a bit wistful, reflecting on how the onetime “young fella” has become the nation’s oldest president.
“There have been good parts of being the youngest and good parts of being the oldest,” he said at a fundraiser in May. “And I hope what I’ve been able to bring to this job, and will continue to bring, is a little bit of wisdom. A little bit of wisdom.”