It is immediately obvious why the White House pushed back as hard as it did on a draft of a report from special counsel Robert Hur summarizing his investigation into President Biden\u2019s possession of classified materials. Hur\u2019s report, both in draft and in its final release, suggested that Biden suffered from significant memory issues, a criticism that was ostensibly offered as a predicate for not filing criminal charges.<\/p>\n
In part because the report otherwise offered little grist for discussion, Hur\u2019s elevation of those memory issues has become a focus of news coverage. House Republicans looped his allegations into their ongoing effort to hobble Biden\u2019s reelection chances. The recurring discussion of Biden\u2019s acuity had a new peg \u2014 one that generated new criticism of the media\u2019s coverage.<\/p>\n
The Hur report\u2019s assessment of Biden immediately brought to mind to many on the left the discussion of Hillary Clinton\u2019s email server in the run-up to the 2016 election. Here again, it seemed, was a (Republican) government official exploring a subject that was politically damaging to a presidential candidate, just like then-FBI Director James B. Comey. And here again was a media willing to hype this issue that Americans wouldn\u2019t otherwise care about.<\/p>\n
But this is overly neat. Although there is a valid discussion to be had over the focus on Biden\u2019s age and capacity, those concerns \u2014 which are common among voters \u2014 are not obviously media-driven.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s not to say it\u2019s entirely organic. One of the first people to draw attention to Biden\u2019s faculties before his 2020 presidential bid was Donald Trump. In early 2018, Trump began referring to Biden as \u201cSleepy Joe.\u201d (Only recently did he abandon this for \u201cCrooked Joe,\u201d repurposing the pejorative he used for Clinton.) This may have been in part a function of Trump\u2019s new focus on his own mental fitness.<\/p>\n
Welcome to the race Sleepy Joe. I only hope you have the intelligence, long in doubt, to wage a successful primary campaign. It will be nasty \u2013 you will be dealing with people who truly have some very sick & demented ideas. But if you make it, I will see you at the Starting Gate!<\/p>\n
\u2014 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 25, 2019<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Trump\u2019s nickname didn\u2019t get much traction until Biden announced his candidacy in April 2019. That month, \u201cSleepy Joe\u201d was mentioned more than 100 times on Fox News and \u2014 generally when quoting Trump \u2014 nearly 90 times on CNN and MSNBC combined. Over the next 19 months, Fox News would mention \u201cSleepy Joe\u201d nearly 1,900 times. About 1 in 9 cable-news uses of \u201cSleepy Joe\u201d since Trump developed the nickname were on Sean Hannity\u2019s prime-time show.<\/p>\n
That was also the point at which Biden\u2019s age became a common topic of conversation, which wasn\u2019t without cause. Biden was already 76, not quite two years younger than Ronald Reagan at the end of his second term. He entered a Democratic field in which he wasn\u2019t even the oldest candidate: That title was held by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). As such, the Democratic nominating contest was quickly framed in generational terms.<\/p>\n
Because the field was so crowded, the first debate took place in two parts. Biden was relegated to the second, facing off against former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg and Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), among others.<\/p>\n
Swalwell, then 38, made repeated references to \u201cgenerational\u201d leadership. He addressed Biden on the point directly.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was 6 years old when a presidential candidate came to the California Democratic Convention and said, \u2018It\u2019s time to pass the torch to a new generation of Americans,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cThat candidate was then-Senator Joe Biden. Joe Biden was right when he said it was time to pass the torch to a new generation of Americans 32 years ago. He\u2019s still right today.\u201d<\/p>\n
In his closing comments, Buttigieg made a similar appeal: \u201cHelp me deliver that new generation to Washington before it\u2019s too late.\u201d<\/p>\n
A few days later, Suffolk University released the results of a poll of Iowa voters. They determined that those who had watched the debate felt that Biden had performed the worst. Suffolk asked those who didn\u2019t have Biden \u2014 the national front-runner \u2014 as their first or second pick why they chose another candidate. A plurality responded that Biden was too old or that they wanted someone younger.<\/p>\n
Biden won the nomination, largely on the strength of his support among Black Americans and the perception that he was the party\u2019s best bet for beating Trump. In early 2020, The Washington Post and our polling partners at ABC News asked Americans whether Biden and Trump had the \u201cmental sharpness\u201d to be president. Just over half said Biden did. Just under half said the same of Trump.<\/p>\n
The 2020 campaign was unusual, but it wasn\u2019t the case that Biden didn\u2019t campaign. A Post analysis of each campaign\u2019s events show dozens in the final weeks by both candidates. But Trump repeatedly insisted that Biden was hunkered down in his \u201cbasement\u201d as he and his allies claimed that Biden was too mentally addled to engage in the campaign forcefully. Biden\u2019s convention speech and debate performances served to effectively rebut those criticisms. Biden won the election.<\/p>\n
Over the course of his presidency, The Post and ABC News have again asked Americans how they evaluate Biden\u2019s and Trump\u2019s mental sharpness. Views of Trump\u2019s have improved since 2020. Views of Biden\u2019s have declined consistently, including among members of his own party.<\/p>\n
Polling from Pew Research Center, conducted more consistently over the course of Biden\u2019s presidency, shows a steady decline in perceptions of Biden\u2019s \u201cmental sharpness.\u201d He\u2019s declined on other measures, too, predictably for a president whose overall approval rating has also dropped since he was first elected. But the 17-point decline on sharpness is the biggest drop by category.<\/p>\n
There was not been substantially more coverage of Biden\u2019s age from the beginning of his presidency until the 2022 midterms than there was from his 2019 announcement until the 2020 election. CNN and MSNBC were less likely to mention his age and mental fitness in an average month during the presidency than before it; Fox News was about equally likely to do so (though much more likely than CNN or MSNBC).<\/p>\n
This is an imperfect proxy for media coverage of the issue, certainly. But it is a measure of it \u2014 and the decline in perceptions of Biden\u2019s sharpness occurred with no measurable increase in cable-news chatter.<\/p>\n
Since the midterms \u2014 and since Trump launched his 2024 candidacy \u2014 discussion of Biden\u2019s age have increased dramatically. Both CNN and MSNBC are talking about Biden\u2019s age and mental state more often each month on average than Fox News did before 2020. Fox News is talking about it more than twice as much as it did then.<\/p>\n
Part of this is due to the fact that Biden is up for reelection \u2014 and that he\u2019s four years older. Americans are quite aware of Biden\u2019s age; polling conducted by YouGov last fall found that 6 in 10 Americans could guess Biden\u2019s age to within two years. An 81-year-old embarking on a potential four-year commitment would raise questions in any circumstance, much less one as important as the presidency. Biden\u2019s opponents, of course, are also happy to elevate those questions.<\/p>\n
But they don\u2019t only come from his opponents. An underrecognized aspect of questions about Biden\u2019s age is that his party is heavily dependent on younger Americans. This was the pitch Swalwell and Buttigieg were making: not just that the party needed a new generation of leaders but that young Democratic voters didn\u2019t need another older person running the country. There is a real and pervasive antipathy among younger Americans to the advanced age of political leaders, and Biden needs those younger Americans more than Trump does.<\/p>\n
A number of things can be true \u2026 and, in this case, are. Some of the earliest attacks on Biden\u2019s age came from Trump \u2014 and from the Democrats vying against him for the nomination. Democrats were expressing concern about Biden\u2019s age even before the primaries began, but declining confidence in his mental sharpness came only after he was elected. The media has at times focused far more on this question than at others, but the aforementioned decline does not correlate neatly to that coverage.<\/p>\n
Here the simplest answer is probably the correct one. Joe Biden is the oldest president in American history, and he wants to be elected to another term in office by a political party dependent on young voters. Hur\u2019s report and the ensuing coverage aren\u2019t helping him do that, but the problem existed even if Hur hadn\u2019t written a thing.<\/p>\n
An earlier version of this column incorrectly referred to Pete Buttigieg as the former mayor of Fort Wayne, Ind. He is the former mayor of South Bend, Ind. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n
It is immediately obvious why the White House pushed back as hard as it did on a draft of a report from special counsel Robert Hur summarizing his investigation into President Biden\u2019s possession of classified materials. Hur\u2019s report, both in draft and in its final release, suggested that Biden suffered from significant memory issues, a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1169,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1168","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1168"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1168\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1169"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}