Joe Biden Looks to Recast His Old Age – Joe Biden’s handlers want him to embrace his aging and cast it as a good thing. Biden, who is 80 now, will be 86 at the end of a second term.
However, Fox News ridiculed the elderly president for wearing Skechers sneakers due to his frail gait and tendency to stumble.
Joe Biden and the Age Issue
“Well, I made a joke last night on Hannity, those shoes—my father will be 87 in a week—and to a man of that generation wearing those shoes, particularly as commander in chief in public, when you’re going on, this is formal business,” McDowell said on the Fox News’ show “Outnumbered.” “That’s the equivalent of wearing your bedroom slippers outside. That’s like wearing a Speedo and flip-flops to a funeral!”
Such hyperbole is a bit excessive, but Biden’s age is not going away as an issue. It’s one that even Democrats have concerns with.
Daily Beast Senior Media Reporter Justin Baragona called the Fox News obsession with pointing out Biden’s age and footwear “a seeming nod to the faux indignation over Barack Obama’s tan suit” complaining the network’s distaste for “President Joe Biden occasionally rocking Skechers while out and about.”
Biden Defenders Minimize Biden Age
The president’s defenders say it’s not a big deal. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told MSNBC that Biden was “just a kid to me.” Disney mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg has suggested that Biden’s age could be an “asset.” Katzenberg claimed that Biden is “energetic” and “effective.”
“President Biden’s age is, in fact, his superpower,” Katzenberg told Reuters. “I think people have tried to paint it as a liability or a negative and I think they are going to fail at that because his age is his knowledge and experience and as he has said, it is his wisdom.”
The Daily Beast, in its reporting, seemed to be covering for Biden in some respects.
“Besides noting that Biden has begun using a shorter staircase to exit and enter Air Force One, Politico also pointed out that, as ‘another concession to comfort necessitated by age,’ the president now sometimes wears athletic shoes while traveling,” Baragona writes. “Over on Fox News, which has relentlessly portrayed the president as senile and decrepit, Biden’s latest sartorial choice is further proof that the leader of the free world is unfit for office.”
Americans Not Convinced That Biden’s Age Isn’t Important
Most Americans aren’t seeing it that way.
A new Yahoo! News/YouGov poll finds that 55% of Americans think Biden is not worthy of a second term. An NBC News poll found in June that 68% of Americans do not think Biden has the necessary mental or physical acumen to be president. By contrast, only 32% said they had no concerns.
It’s not only right-wingers who are concerned about Biden’s age.
“I am deeply grateful to Joe Biden. By defeating Donald Trump in 2020, he rescued this country from the continuing misrule of a dangerous grifter and serial liar, a man gripped by vindictiveness, lawlessness, and egomania. By contrast, Biden presented himself, correctly, as a decent, experienced, and entirely normal politician. He may even have saved his country. Americans owe him a profound debt of respect and appreciation,” prominent Never Trumper Eliot A. Cohen wrote in The Atlantic last month. “He also has no business running for president at age 80. I say that with considerable feeling, being in my late 60s and knowing that my 70s are not far off. I am as healthy as any late-middle-aged person (admittedly, I cringe at the word old, which tells you something right there) can be.
Cohen continued: “But I know that at this stage, I do not have the energy I had a decade ago. I forget more things, and if my body does not hurt when I wake up in the morning, a little voice in my head asks whether I am dead, and do not yet know it.”
John Rossomando is a defense and counterterrorism analyst and served as Senior Analyst for Counterterrorism at The Investigative Project on Terrorism for eight years. His work has been featured in numerous publications such as The American Thinker, The National Interest, National Review Online, Daily Wire, Red Alert Politics, CNSNews.com, The Daily Caller, Human Events, Newsmax, The American Spectator, TownHall.com, and Crisis Magazine. He also served as senior managing editor of The Bulletin, a 100,000-circulation daily newspaper in Philadelphia, and received the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors first-place award for his reporting.
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