For the last week or so, Joe Biden’s closest allies have been unified in their public responses to the painful questions about his age, memory, and fitness for high office unleashed by special counsel Robert Hur’s report. The 81-year-old president, they insist, is sharp and up to the job, no matter what a conservative prosecutor thinks. To hear many of them tell it, the ensuing coverage — especially the countless columns and TV commentary segments questioning Biden’s place on Democrats’ ticket — has been the product of an irresponsible pundit class that would prefer to critique the president’s speaking style than focus on the substance of his governance.
Yet to many of the Democrats who’ve been at Biden’s side the longest, there’s an extra dimension to the frustration. Though few deny that Biden’s aging is readily visible to anyone who looks, and that it’s likely to be a political problem and even a legitimate concern for Americans, many see in the last week confirmation of a long-held suspicion that Washington’s chatterers in particular simply don’t get Biden as a politician, and certainly not his appeal to voters.
“People want to understand and feel that the president gets what’s going on in their lives, and the life of a New York Times editorial board member is not the same as a union member in Michigan who’s trying to fill the table for their family every evening,” said Kate Bedingfield, a longtime senior adviser to Biden and his first White House communications director.
A few days earlier, citing the reams of polling suggesting even Democrats are worried about Biden’s age, the Times had urged Biden to appear in more unscripted settings, both directly with voters and in press conferences, to assuage concerns the editorial board suggested could be near-fatal to his candidacy. A wide range of Biden’s longtime friends, current and former aides, and allies have said such analyses predictably misread what voters appreciate about the president, especially how he communicates “without a layer of condescension and irony, and I think that feels uncomfortable to people who traffic in both of those things,” per Bedingfield.
It’s a long-standing criticism some Bidenites are only now comfortable airing publicly, possibly because they are wary of the fact that complaining about press coverage is standard for lagging campaigns and unpopular incumbents. They believe voters trust Biden because of his extensive experience and will ultimately view any questions about his abilities through the lens of a binary choice between him and the man who’s almost sure to be his opponent, Donald Trump — a view they think was partially vindicated by Democratic voters in swingy Pennsylvania this week. And some tasked with communicating for Biden are convinced the recent drumbeat of columns fits a long pattern of Washington tastemakers simply underestimating him.
“These same individuals tend to be eager to impose a negative age narrative on anything, but many decision-makers have apparently memory-holed every Biden success since they predicted he couldn’t win the 2020 primary,” said deputy White House press secretary Andrew Bates. (One Biden 2020 alum likened the moment to when analysts assumed Biden wasn’t leaning left enough to win that primary, suggesting that now those pundits, who misread Democratic Party politics, are crying about lower readership numbers into their “Warren 2020 mugs.”)
“It’s hard to cover someone effectively who you decided to stop learning about five years ago. Too often the default assumption is, If Biden’s approach is X, X will fail,” Bates continued. “That’s how his primary and general election campaigns were covered. The groundbreaking infrastructure, climate, Medicare, China competitiveness, gun reform, and recovery laws he signed were covered the same way. The midterms and the 2023 elections, too.”
The broader Biden-world posture reflects a belief that — despite Hur’s allegations about Biden’s memory — his age is not a day-to-day problem as he directs the government, but instead that voter (and media) concerns about it are a primarily political matter. Further, they doubt that it will be the most important issue on voters’ minds by the fall due to Trump’s presence on the ballot and the continued threat he and Republicans pose to abortion rights in particular.
Still, poll after poll demonstrates significant voter worries about the president’s senescence, and the problem is only getting worse. “The times I’ve been with him in the White House, he’s the same fucking guy. I haven’t seen anything that gives me any kind of pause or reason for concern,” one longtime Biden friend who’s a similar age told me this week. But, he continued, “the biggest problem Joe has is the way he walks, and the walking translates to ‘frail,’ and the frail translates to ‘feeble,’ and the feeble translates to ‘mentally deficient.’ I get the psychology of it all, but they haven’t yet put him in situations that would demonstrate publicly there’s no need to worry.”
It’s only natural, then, to wonder this: If the shapers of public opinion simply misunderstand Biden, isn’t at least some of the onus on his team to convey a positive image of him, and his health, more effectively?
Most of those in Biden’s current employ reject this view and have become more aggressive in airing their frustration with coverage of the president — and the relative dearth of focus on his policy initiatives in favor of stories about the political implications of his age. So far, the White House has not previewed any immediate change in strategy, though people close to Biden’s political operation have long insisted he would ramp up his campaign schedule as the year progresses and that he performs best when up close and personal with voters. (This doesn’t necessarily mean an uptick in interviews or news conferences, another frequent ask of his press corps and even some supporters.) “There’s a big divergence between what makes for effective modern communications strategy and what the Washington press corps would most enjoy consuming themselves,” said Bates. “For example, we will not host a roundtable at Tatte about Ozempic.”
Biden’s campaign aides have recently taken their lack of patience with the political press public, hoping to pressure reporters and chatterers to reevaluate the balance of their coverage and take Trump’s daily outbursts more seriously. The day after Hur’s report, senior campaign adviser TJ Ducklo circulated a statement titled, “Are Y’All Actually Paying Attention? Like With Your Eyes and Ears???” that pointed to Trump’s lies and mistakes at an NRA rally in Pennsylvania. Included: “Trump falsely said terrorists were taken into this country by the millions … Trump falsely claims ‘nothing happens’ to people who commit assault or murder … Trump falsely said everyone coming to the country is a man between 18 and 25 … Trump falsely said they’ll change the name of PA if he’s not elected.” Days later, he made his point even clearer, replacing the standard “in case you missed it” press release heading with, “You Probably Did Miss It: Donald Trump Said He’d Abandon Our Allies.” He proceeded to detail at length how major newspapers and TV news programs devoted far more coverage to Biden’s age than to Trump’s recent encouragement of Vladimir Putin to attack Europe. Before long, the campaign posted two top aides mocking the Times’ depiction of Trump rallies to TikTok, suggesting it was comically fawning.
The increasingly open anger with the mainstream D.C. media hasn’t come without pushback. After the White House used its press-pool report email list to distribute spokesman Ian Sams’s letter to media organizations taking issue with their coverage of the Hur report, the White House Correspondents’ Association said it would no longer allow such “generalized critiques of news coverage” from the White House on its list.
To the people who actually spend the most time with Biden, the mounting depiction of Biden as too old for the job is simply unfair. No one denies that he speaks more haltingly, softly, and slowly than before, but many contend it’s the return of his famous childhood stutter. Others point out — often — that Biden has been well known for his tendency to gaffe and ramble for decades, and that at times during his second term as vice-president, that had even been viewed by some supporters as endearing.
More still complain that though he is on-camera frequently, Biden’s speeches and roundtables get little attention unless he flubs a line, like transposing Egypt for Mexico in his post-Hur press conference. “The federal government is an incredibly complex place and the issues around the federal government are very complex. And very often there are commentators in media who don’t understand some of the bigger issues so they go to issues they can understand,” said Ted Kaufman, Biden’s 84-year-old longtime friend who for years served as his chief of staff and adviser, and who succeeded him in the Senate when Biden became vice-president. “That’s what’s driving the old-age issue. Everyone’s an expert on age.”
This, of course, is not a new dynamic. The last time the “Biden is too old to run again” argument seized Washington was last fall, when David Ignatius, a voice of the old-school D.C. Establishment, argued as much in the Washington Post. A few days later, about 150 of Biden’s top donors gathered in private in Chicago’s Millennium Park to hear about his campaign and to look for reassurance as his poll numbers sank. Delaware senator Chris Coons, a co-chairman of the campaign, got onstage to argue Biden wasn’t getting the credit he deserved: “I just came from D.C., and I feel like I traveled around the world. Our president did just travel around the world, and on the stage at the global meeting in India and the follow-up meeting in Vietnam that just happened, sadly most of our nation only hear him say, ‘I need to go to bed.’ That’s the current media environment in which we live, but the reality was: He literally pulled two back-to-back all-nighters.”
Coons rifled through Biden’s itinerary, including negotiating to add the African Union to the G-20 and continuing “his leadership that has brought 47 countries to the aid of Ukraine.” He turned, sarcastically, to Ignatius’s column. The columnist, he said, “revealed a deep secret to me in that column, one I didn’t previously know. Our president is 80! I was unaware!” He returned to sincerity. “Too old for what? Too old to lead on the world stage? Demonstrably no! In the face of Russia, in the face of China, in the face of the most difficult moment we’ve seen since the Second World War. FDR, LBJ, JRB. Joseph Robinette Biden is the most consequential global leader of our lives.”
Not even Biden likes to go quite that far. Still, for months he has privately allowed some frustration with the columns about his age, though he usually brushes them aside instead of stewing over them as he did when told about Ignatius’s column. He seldom sees an upside in playing press critic publicly, notwithstanding some smiling knocks on his regular chroniclers. (What was he giving up for Lent?, asked a White House reporter this week. “You guys.”) Yet his impatience with the focus on his age has become more obvious when the cameras are turned on, like during his impromptu press conference after Hur’s report dropped, when he raged at Hur’s suggestion that Biden couldn’t remember when his son Beau died. “How in the hell he dare raise that?”
His immediate displeasure with Hur was in part over the sensitivity of the subject matter. But the longer-term annoyance is also about how personally uncomfortable the chatter can get. Though some of Biden’s friends maintain that his muddier speech is stutter-related, Biden himself has resisted conceding that much; it was such a sensitive topic in 2020 that he hesitated to let his campaign staff amplify content about the childhood stutter despite being shown that it was relatable and polling well.
What he is not, however, is exactly surprised by the coverage. He has considered how to answer questions about his age every time he has weighed a presidential campaign in the last decade. There may be no simple answer, but “he has more experience than anybody who has ever been president, so he knows the way things are. It’s not like people are coming into this saying, ‘Oh, I can’t believe this!’” said Kaufman. “He’s a big boy. He’s studied this stuff, he’s thought about it. It comes with the territory.”
