Our 4,327th story on Joe Biden’s age grapples with the mystery of why so many voters are concerned about Joe Biden’s age

Small Swedish joke; you laugh now:
Widespread concerns about President Biden’s age pose a deepening threat to his re-election bid, with a majority of voters who supported him in 2020 now saying he is too old to lead the country effectively, according to a new poll by The New York Times and Siena College.
The survey pointed to a fundamental shift in how voters who backed Mr. Biden four years ago have come to see him. A striking 61 percent said they thought he was “just too old” to be an effective president.
A sizable share was even more worried: Nineteen percent of those who voted for Mr. Biden in 2020, and 13 percent of those who said they would back him in November, said the 81-year-old president’s age was such a problem that he was no longer capable of handling the job.
The misgivings about Mr. Biden’s age cut across generations, gender, race and education, underscoring the president’s failure to dispel both concerns within his own party and Republican attacks painting him as senile. Seventy-three percent of all registered voters said he was too old to be effective, and 45 percent expressed a belief that he could not do the job.
A few graphs later this story points out that Donald Trump is also really old and sounds like your demented racist uncle after he’s been watching several straight hours of FOX News pretty much all the time now, but, uh, let’s get back to interviewing the common clay of the West:
Otto Abad, 50, an independent voter in Scott, La., said he voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 but planned to flip his support to Mr. Trump if they faced off again. Last time, he wanted a less divisive figure in the White House after the chaos of the Trump administration. Now, he worries that Mr. Biden is not quite up for a second term.
“If he was in this sort of mental shape, I didn’t realize back then,” Mr. Abad said. “He’s aged a lot. With the exception of Trump, every president seems to age a lot during their presidency.”
He added: “Trump, one of the few things I would say good about him, is that nothing seems to bother him. He seems like he’s in the same mental shape he was 10 years ago, 12 years ago, 15 years ago. He’s like a cockroach.”
I know you’re thinking I made up that last quote.
After a night of uneasy dreams, I awoke to find myself transformed into the world’s biggest Ariana Grande fan.
Shermaine Elmore, 44, a small-business owner in Baltimore, voted for Mr. Biden four years ago, backing the Democratic candidate as he had in previous elections.
But he said he had made more money under Mr. Trump, blaming inflation and gas prices for his losses during the Biden administration. He planned to vote for Mr. Trump this fall.
Goddamit.
This unease, which has long surfaced in polls and in quiet conversations with Democratic officials, appears to be growing as Mr. Biden moves toward formally capturing his party’s nomination. The poll was conducted more than two weeks after scrutiny of his age intensified in early February, when a special counsel described him in a report as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and “diminished faculties in advancing age.”
OK, to quote the later Wittgenstein, JFC WTF?
Robert Hur’s hack smear hit job masquerading as the oracular voice of the Department of Justice (thanks Merrick Garland!) says this:
“Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview with him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Mr. Hur wrote.
That’s prosecutor-ese for “this wily codger is going to strategically pretend to be a doddering old man who can’t remember anything so he can get off the hook with a manipulable jury.” In other words, Hur is saying the EXACT OPPOSITE THING from what he’s been endlessly quoted as supposedly saying about Biden’s supposed senility!
I’m so tired.