Misty water-colored memories

This post appeared on LGM almost exactly five years ago to the day. It was entitled The Absurdity of an Eightysomething President:

I’m convinced that one of the downstream effects of putting a totally unqualified and mentally unhinged grifter into the White House is that lots of far more modest prudential rules than “don’t make a thieving madman at the head of a cult of personality president of the United States” get much easier to ignore.

One of those rules would be, don’t put somebody in the White House who would be in his eighties for most of his presidency.

I’m genuinely puzzled by how people can’t see what a reckless and absurd thing it would be to do that.

The risks associated with advanced old age — death, dementia, serious illness, and other forms of sudden steep decline in cognitive and physical ability — increase exponentially as people move into their eighties.

It’s a fool’s game to try to guess what the specific odds are of today’s spry 78-year-old becoming a shell of his former self a very few years down the road. Suffice it to say that the epidemiological data for the general population are grim. And of course almost all of us have seen this process up close and personal at one time or another with relatives and friends and colleagues.

The eighties are often brutal years for even genetically lucky people with healthy lifestyles and little day to day stress (a major health risk all by itself) in their lives.

All of which is to say that the idea of electing a soon-to-be eightysomething president is just nuts. It’s a particularly extreme form of the Myth of the Indispensable Man. It’s something I’m convinced seems less than insanely reckless at this particular historical moment in large part because 62 million American voters thought it was a great idea to do something even more insanely reckless, by putting someone like Donald Trump in office.

The question of how old somebody can be and still be considered a good candidate for president despite their age is obviously an open one, but eighty? Or anything very close to that?

Come on.

. . . two points I meant to add but omitted in a rush:

(1) What about re-election? Since the passage of the 22nd amendment every president who has served one full term has gotten his party’s nomination for another term, with the exception of LBJ. Are we seriously going to have an argument about electing someone in his mid-80s to another four-year term? And if Biden or Sanders finesses this by pledging not to run, you have all the disadvantages that come with that.

(2) I don’t think the main risk here is death while in office, or at least not a sudden unexpected death. The bigger risk is loss of capacity/competence, in a system that really has no effective way of removing someone who clearly shouldn’t be in the office any more (see our present situation). An ongoing deteriorating health situation that wasn’t producing an extreme enough result to obviously require the invocation of the 25th amendment would be a constitutional nightmare. The risks of that happening to a president in his or her 80s are again exponentially higher than the risks for candidates even a decade younger.

A few months later, in December, Ryan Lizza published a piece with the following lede:

Former Vice President Joe Biden’s top advisers and prominent Democrats outside the Biden campaign have recently revived a long-running debate whether Biden should publicly pledge to serve only one term, with Biden himself signaling to aides that he will serve only a single term.

While the option of making a public pledge remains available, Biden has for now settled on an alternative strategy: quietly indicate that he will almost certainly not run for a second term while declining to make a promise that he and his advisers fear could turn him into a lame duck and sap him of his political capital.

According to four people who regularly talk to Biden, all of whom asked for anonymity to discuss internal campaign matters, it is virtually inconceivable that he will run for re-election in 2024, when he would be the first octogenarian president.

Biden’s campaign quickly disavowed this story, so I think the most that can be said is this was an idea that got kicked around in the early stages of the campaign. It did, however, inspire another post by yours truly entitled And This is Just One Reason Why You Shouldn’t Consider Electing Eightysomething Presidents. That post consisted of the following observation, after a pull quote from Lizza’s article:

What could easily happen instead is that Biden gets elected, shows various signs of accelerating decrepitude during his first term, and decides to run for re-election anyway, triggering a brutal intra-party fight.

Yeah my prog rock debut album is going to be called Dr. Nostradamus and the Bloggers of Doom.

But seriously, should you delve into the hundreds of comments to those two posts, you will have a great deal of difficulty finding anyone disagreeing with anything in either of them. Here I should note that at the time this wasn’t only or even primarily about Joe Biden. I supported Sanders in 2016, but switched to Warren in 2020, because for among other reasons I thought by 2020 Sanders was just too old, while the 71-year-old Warren was close to the line but not over it, considering her other strengths.

Now Joe Biden has been a very fine president overall. But what is happening over the last few months of his (first?) term is going to end up as a cautionary tale, no matter how things should turn out in the end.

But that is not my doing. I merely foretell.

. . . Biden has Covid.