In a report sure to find its place in the annals of politically damaging exonerations, Robert Hur, the special counsel appointed to investigate Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents, cleared the President of wrongdoing, and explicitly distinguished his behavior from Donald Trump’s more egregious misconduct in a similar case. But Hur, a Republican, also noted that he didn’t recommend charges in part because Biden would likely come across to a jury as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Among his claims was that Biden couldn’t recall when he’d been Vice-President, or when his son Beau had died, “even within several years.”
Biden’s supporters saw the language as a gratuitous partisan attack, a speculative salvo far outside the prosecutor’s purview; his lawyers said it was “highly prejudicial.” Clearly sensing the precarity of the moment, the White House called a press conference at which Biden forcefully disputed Hur’s characterization. A few minutes later, though, in answering a question about hostage negotiations in Israel, he referred to Egypt’s President as the leader of Mexico. One Democrat declared it the “worst day of his Presidency.”
Biden’s age, of course, has long been a topic of debate, and conservatives have spent much of his Presidency sharing clips of names misremembered and words misspoken. (Last month, at an event in Iowa, Trump even mocked Biden’s stutter.) But the report, carrying the imprimatur of official inquiry, shifted the atmospheric conditions. If old age was in the air, the clouds burst open. Hur’s words were so cutting because they resonate with what many voters already think. In a swing-state poll conducted by the Times last fall, seventy-one per cent of respondents said that Biden was too old to be President; more than six in ten thought that he lacked the mental acuity for the job. (In national polling, a majority of Democrats also say he’s too old for a second term.) Other surveys suggest that being old is seen as a kind of crime: Americans are equally loath to support candidates over the age of eighty and candidates who’ve been charged with a felony. A third of respondents would set the maximum age for elected officials at seventy (and some would set it even lower). By that standard, about a fifth of the current Congress would be aged out.
Ageism certainly plays a role in such attitudes. But it would be a mistake to cast concerns about Biden’s age as simply a distillation of biases against the elderly. Trump, if reëlected, would also finish his term as an octogenarian, but voters harbor considerably fewer misgivings about his age. (It’s possible that the question of age is overshadowed by Trump’s more general incoherence; earlier this month, he claimed that Democrats were trying to change the name of Pennsylvania, and encouraged Russia to attack U.S. allies.) In Biden’s case, the public is responding to the particularities of his presentation and performance. Roll footage of his speeches from 2016 or 2020 and you don’t need to take last week’s videos out of context,