At 86, which would be Biden’s age had he won and survived a second term, I have mixed feelings about his stepping aside, even if he was bum-rushed by his billionaire backers.
I sympathized with Joe even though I wouldn’t want him as a crossing guard. Old age always comes at a bad time. My lower back makes too many of my decisions these days; tolerable for a laid-back semi-rural life, but dicey if Bibi and Putin are waiting for callbacks. I smile a lot to cover having missed the last joke or your name. And it’s only lately—after a term as, yes, a president—that I’ve come to realize that there’s very little extra a person in their 80s brings to the game.
I was president of a small town’s senior citizen foundation, a fundraising, do-gooder group whose board was made up of a dozen elderly people who variously worked hard, lazily, innovatively, obstructively, in alert or zombie-like modes—pretty much, I thought, as they had acted all their lives. Institutional memory was a good thing, but too often it appeared as numbing anecdotage. The nice ones could be passive, the mean ones relentless. Being old was not a shared identity beyond aching joints. In Biden’s world, I thought, these included the entitled seniors whose “wisdom” sent youngsters to war.
Was I being too cranky (read: old) wanting Biden begone? I checked with my closest old friend, the actor Harris Yulin, who is my age. He, too, had been appalled by Biden’s debate performance and was relieved when he quit, even understanding the trade-offs. Old actors have fears of not retaining their lines, but they know how to anticipate and prepare for the inevitable panics. Okay, we agreed, Biden had seen everything and wouldn’t be rattled by a fluctuation in the Fed. But we were worried he’d stumble on the campaign trail and be run over by Trump.
So what’s worth the risk, we wonder? It’s all about never counting an old guy out, we decided. When my dad retired in his early 70s, he declared himself useless, over-the-hill, and settled into a rocking chair life. His knees and ears were shot, he said. I can’t travel or hold a conversation. That lasted a year. He was tapped to help old people with taxes and their interactions with local government agencies. He had a surge of fresh life that lasted until he died suddenly three months shy of 101.
Let’s remember that Biden’s presidency was also a delayed renewal after he was passed over in 2016. It was successful enough that in giving it up he has been compared to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. This seems rather grand: Washington was presciently concerned about creating a monarchical president and Lincoln’s Civil War was further advanced than Biden’s. What I think was truly admirable was a more personal crisis, giving up what I have come to think of as “the warm,” that affirming focus of light that comes from fame, as small as it might be—in my case three stints as a TV talk show host—especially if the intoxication of it includes feeling a righteous destiny as Biden surely did (“I’m the guy,” he kept chanting in a recent ABC interview).