(Dobbs) Watch Him Before You Judge Him
What's worse: Biden's years or Trump's criminal charges?
Joe Biden gets a raw deal.
In a poll that came out late last month, The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research asked people what comes to mind when they think of the two leading contenders for the presidency. The top terms voters used for Donald Trump were “corrupt” and “dishonest.” Their top terms for Joe Biden were “old” and “confused.”
I don’t have to make a case for Trump being corrupt and dishonest. Prosecutors from Washington to Atlanta to New York have done a fine job making that case themselves.
But I can make a case that when acting as president, Joe Biden is neither old nor confused. He is calm. He is considerate.
There’s no denying it, he’s 80. But voters shouldn’t look at Biden's age on a calendar. They should look at how he spends every day on that calendar. If they do, they’ll see that while Biden moves more slowly and speaks more softly than he used to, he has more energy and gets more done than many people half his age.
Look at his travel schedule alone. Only two weeks ago Biden crossed seven time zones without ever leaving the United States, to inspect the ravages and console survivors from the fires on Maui.
Then six days ago he was surveying the damage and comforting victims from Hurricane Idalia in Florida.
And now he’s in India. As you read this, the president just flew halfway around the world. Fourteen hours on an airplane gets the better of anyone, but facing Biden immediately after landing was a bilateral meeting with Indian prime minister Modi. After that, as the leader of the free world, he’ll be prodding his fellow leaders at the G-20 summit in New Delhi to support everything from the fight against climate change to the fight against Russia in Ukraine.
You can’t pull that off if you’re “old” and “confused.” You can if you’re calm and considerate.
And this won’t even be Biden’s toughest foreign trip this year.
That would be his secret journey in February to see the war in Ukraine up close. He lifted off for Poland at 4 in the morning, crossed six time zones, then took the ten-hour train ride to the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, and then, after spending the day on the ground, he was on the train for ten more hours to get out.
But while Biden was tired, he wasn’t through. He went on to Warsaw and met with the leaders of Poland and Moldova, then separately with leaders of the Bucharest Nine alliance, and with the Secretary-General of NATO.
With all that’s at stake, he had no time to be “old” or “confused.”
And those aren’t the president’s only overseas trips. This year alone he has flown to Belfast and Dublin, Hiroshima and Lithuania, Ottawa and Mexico.
And, for good measure, he also has put down in 20 other states, sometimes to recognize innovations in factories across the country, sometimes to show sympathy for the victims of mass shootings.
The travel is grueling enough, but even more so because the president’s always in the spotlight. When he leaves India in three days’ time, he stops in Vietnam, aiming to upgrade our relationship with a nation which is central to the Pacific rivalry between the U.S. and China.
I’ve traveled overseas with presidents. They have the eyes of the world upon them. They arbitrate issues that are existential. You just can’t do all that if you’re “old” and “confused.”
It’s certainly fair to say, Joe Biden doesn’t have to tolerate the travel nightmares the rest of us sometimes suffer. Air Force One is a pretty sweet way to go. But still, he not only has to defy his body clock, but when he gets off the plane, he sometimes has to sit down to negotiate war and peace.
Even when he’s home, Joe Biden, like any president, spends more time behind closed doors calling and cajoling members of Congress to support legislation he’s pushing. When he steps off Air Force One from the India/Vietnam trip, he’ll go right to work in Washington fighting to ensure that the government stays funded. And, of course, there are the signings of legislation he has pushed for and the occasional obligatory photo op with the Pork Producer of the Year.
This president, like any president, lives in a fishbowl. There’s bound to be an occasional flub, but we’ve seen that with every president.
Yet the story the Republicans push that even many Democrats are buying is that Biden isn’t up to the job. And it’s sticking. In that AP/NORC poll, 77 percent of adult Americans, including 69 percent of Democrats, said that Biden’s too old to be effective during a second term.
In another poll by the Wall Street Journal that came out Monday, 73 percent of registered voters said that Biden is too old to serve four more years in the White House.
True, some are concerned not so much with Biden’s age today as they are with his age at the end of a second term. It’s a credible concern. But slower talk and slower movements don't tell us what we need to know about the president. What we should be watching is what he does. Many do watch and don’t like what they see, and while I’d argue that he has made this a better nation, that’s a valid measure. But when people write him off because of his age, they aren't giving him a fair shake.
In that AP/NORC poll, when a security guard in Mississippi was asked about Biden, he told the pollster, “He looks like he needs to be someone’s kindly grandpa on the arm, not someone at the wheel of power.” But his narrative about Trump was harsher, commenting that the former president “acts like a kindergartner when people tell him ‘no’.”
So when we look ahead to next year’s election, all those years are a black mark against Biden. But all those criminal charges might be a bigger black mark against Trump.
Over more than 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, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other 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, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
I will take thoughtful slow government to the chaos of the Trump years any time. And the economy? Let's not forget what has really been happening as opposed to the GOP invective and war games. Keep making that thoughtful analysis- I feel better when I get it.
They're almost the same age. I'll take calm and considerate and a little slower over corrupt and dishonest every day.