President Joe Biden’s 79th birthday has renewed questions about his physical health, mental acuity, and succession plans as Vice President Kamala Harris, his heir apparent, comes under even more scrutiny.
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Aides half Biden’s age have struggled in the White House’s pressure cooker work environment, according to Cesar Conda, a Republican strategist and former Vice President Dick Cheney’s onetime domestic policy adviser.
“That’s why staffers last only one to two years,” Conda said of “the incredibly high-stress” workplace.
Biden’s physical and mental fitness as the country’s oldest president ever was underscored this week not only by his birthday but the first annual checkup of his term. It also piqued interest in Harris as the next Democratic Party standard-bearer after Biden transferred power to her for 85 minutes while he was under anesthesia for a colonoscopy.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki was needled Friday regarding fresh Politico /Morning Consult polling this week that found a majority of respondents do not agree Biden is in “good health.”
“I can’t speak to the assessments of voters,” Psaki said. “There is certainly quite a bit of conspiracy theory-pushing out there on an array of social media platforms and even through the mouths of elected officials, so that could certainly be a root cause.”
When he became president, Biden was older than Ronald Reagan when he left office. And, despite White House protestations, there is a sense that Biden’s physical and mental abilities are “starting to fail,” according to historian and Reagan biographer Craig Shirley.
“Mental acuity is not something one ever gets better from — only a matter of how worse and how soon,” Shirley said.
But Biden following Donald Trump, previously the oldest president, is symptomatic of societal changes and medical advances, according to David Greenberg, another historian and fellow political commentator.
“Although decline is not uncommon, it is also common to be functioning at a very high level in one’s 80s or even, in some cases, one’s 90s,” Greenberg said.
As Biden and Harris’s overall job approval ratings plummet, Republican strategist John Feehery contended Biden’s “feebleness, not inflation,” is driving down his numbers. On average, about two-fifths of respondents approve of Biden, while 53% disapprove, according to RealClearPolitics. Harris’s favorability roughly aligns with that of her boss.
“Most voters just don’t feel that comfortable with Biden at the driver’s wheel,” Feehery said. “Most voters also assume that Biden is not running again, which is why so much attention is being paid to Harris.”
“The more Biden hides from the media, the more people speculate about his health. But, similarly, the more he appears in public, the more people speculate about his health,” the press secretary to former House Speaker Dennis Hastert added. “Biden’s handlers have a no-win situation.”
Biden has insisted he will contest the presidency again in 2024. And Greenberg, a Rutgers University history, journalism, and media studies professor, considered it “very early” for Biden to announce a reelection campaign.
If Biden does not declare his candidacy, Greenberg concurred that Harris is his heir apparent, a general pattern established since World War II with Richard Nixon, Herbert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, George H.W. Bush, and Al Gore.
“But that is a very modest claim, because all that’s saying is that there is no one out there who is an obvious, preferred alternative,” Greenberg said. “You can be the front-runner and have the odds against you.”
For Shirley, a Republican strategist, vice presidents-turned-commanders in chief have a mixed track record, ranging from Harry Truman and Calvin Coolidge to John Tyler.
“Other VPs went through just as much scrutiny as Harris, and criticism was great, although she gets a pass because of the liberalness of the national media and the facts of her sex and race and politics,” Shirley said, an opinion with which the White House disagrees.
Conda, the former Cheney aide, likened Harris to Dan Quayle, who once quipped he had “made good judgments in the past” and “in the future.”
“Like Quayle, I don’t think Harris’s image can recover,” Conda said. “She’s been on the national political scene for years, and perceptions of her abilities, or lack thereof, are already baked in the cake.”
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Biden is expected to spend his birthday at his million-dollar Delaware beach house after a busy week traveling to battleground states to promote his $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure deal and the House passing his $2 trillion partisan social welfare and climate spending bill. The broader measure still needs to clear the Senate, an uncertain prospect thanks to centrist Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.
