(Dobbs) Biden Is Old, But Perfectly Competent
Rumors recirculated often enough— regurgitated often enough— begin to be accepted as fact.
A friend of mine— and this guy isn’t even glued to Fox News— told me a few days ago that having seen mental degradation in his own family for many years, he’s convinced that Joe Biden is “mentally incompetent.” He is convinced, in fact, that when Biden speaks out in public, he’s parroting words “he’s hearing in his earpiece.”
Can I guarantee that my friend is wrong? No. But I’ve covered, even traveled internationally with, five presidents— from Gerald Ford to Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan to George H.W. Bush to George W. Bush (I only covered Clinton as a candidate)— and from what I saw of presidential performances over 35 years, I believe Biden is perfectly competent. He’s old, yes. But when it comes to his capabilities, and what he does in the course of a presidential day, arguably he’s more competent than a lot of us, no matter how much younger we may be.
And yet, because he’s 79, because he stumbles on words and sporadically speaks listlessly, because he’s sometimes slow and sometimes stiff, “stories” about Biden’s “mental degradation” abound. When rumors are recirculated often enough— I would even say regurgitated often enough— they take on a life of their own. They begin to be accepted as fact.
Conservative media had a field day, for example, with Biden’s bike mishap. The middle of last month, he was riding near his Delaware home, and when he came to a crowd waiting along his route, his foot got caught in a basket on the pedal as he started to dismount, and he fell.
So what?! I’ve taken my share of falls from bikes— the worst was when I was more like 49 than 79. And I didn’t have a hundred people with their eyes trained on me. Most men Biden’s age— probably most men ten years younger— couldn’t even get their leg over the horizontal bar of a bike, let alone ride it.
So yes, the man fell. It proved nothing about any “degradation.” If it did, then what can we infer from Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan each falling during their presidencies on the steps of Air Force One?
What people don’t always know, and therefore don’t always appreciate, is how hard it is— how exhausting it is— to be on public display from the moment each morning when you walk out the door. They don’t know how much energy Biden, or any president, has to conjure up when he’s in the public eye, always, as the center of attention.
Nor do they always understand or appreciate how hard a president works. What we can see, from a major policy address to commiserations with victims of mass shootings to awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to a handshake with the Pig Farmer of the Year, is only a part of what a president does. He spends much more time being president behind the scenes, phoning legislators and strategizing with staff and reading policy papers and sitting through briefings. Not to mention those crisis calls in the middle of the night.
And Biden’s verbal gaffes? First, that’s hardly news. He was prone to stray from the script and garble his words when he was a young senator, let alone President of the United States. Second, as a child he had a speech defect and deserves credit, not condemnation, for how far he has come. And third, think about the odds of flubbing it if you had to speak publicly as much as a president does. Did Donald “Covfefe” Trump always get it right? George W. Bush? Even the eloquent Barack Obama? Hardly. Sometimes, quite simply, your mouth gets ahead of your mind. I spent eight years as a radio talk show host and was alternately amused or horrified when someone at the station played back my misshapen rhetoric. But spend four hours a day, five days a week behind a microphone, mistakes are bound to happen.
So it is for presidents. At any age.
Then there’s the travel.
As he did last month for a G-7 summit in Germany, President Biden flies off tonight to the Middle East. He’ll cross seven time zones, and almost immediately after stepping off the plane he’ll have to be alert enough to negotiate war and peace.
For decades as a network correspondent, I regularly flew across oceans and time zones, and wasn’t always alert enough when I reached my destination to negotiate a better hotel room. True, I could get off the plane, sometimes after two consecutive overnight flights, and go right to work. But you know what? I was in my 30s, my 40s, my 50s, at the very latest, my early 60s. What Biden does, for a 79-year-old man, is pretty remarkable, especially when you think about Americans who complain that they can’t fully function after we move our clocks forward or back by a single hour for Daylight Savings Time.
But still, despite all that, The New York Times released a poll just yesterday, asking Democrats who don’t want Biden to run for a second term, why? The plurality’s answer? Age.
You don’t have to cut Joe Biden any slack, but you should. It’s understandable that sometimes he looks a little tired, walks a little slowly, speaks a little unevenly. But he’s doing the job. Having come into the Oval Office on Day One with as many challenges as some presidents face in four years, I’d say he’s doing it pretty well, all things considered.
Yes, Joe Biden is old. At 79, there is no denying it. But out of it? Mentally incompetent? In my book, not even close.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
Thank you. So glad you wrote this