An Aging President’s Playbook
Running for reelection in 1984, Ronald Reagan skillfully dispensed with the “age issue.” It won’t be as easy for Joe Biden.
In late January 1984, Ronald Reagan formally announced his candidacy for a second term in the White House. His chances looked good. After early challenges – an assassination attempt, soaring inflation followed by a brief but painful recession – Reagan’s America was experiencing a robust economic recovery that was fast becoming a boom. Millions of Americans had warmed to a president who had infused the office with an odd but appealing mash-up of grandfatherly warmth, Hollywood glamor and 80s glitz.
In the eyes of most political observers, there was just one major question that seemed to stand in the way of the president’s re-election: At age 73, could he handle four more years as leader of the free world?
The press called it “the age issue” and it was a big one. Reagan had taken the oath of office just two weeks before his seventieth birthday, making him, at the time, the oldest person ever inaugurated president. (The two most recent occupants of the Oval Office have, of course, pushed Reagan’s ranking to number three.) By his fourth year in office, there were small but noticeable signs of his advancing years – the hearing aide he’d started wearing in press conferences, a gingerly slowness in his gait, flecks of gray in his chestnut hair. Traits that had always been part of the unique Reagan persona – his abbreviated workdays and expansive vacations; his heavy dependence on staff and his general fogginess about faces, names and facts – all now carried a worrying tinge of slowness or senility. A re-elected Reagan would be staring down 78 by the end of his second term. Wasn’t that too old for the hardest job in the world?
As the 1984 campaign took shape, the concerns about Reagan’s age were a big story in the press. An Indiana newspaper sent a reporter to a senior citizens’ center to poll residents on their views on the topic. “I think he’s too old,” said one senior who, like Reagan, was 73. “In fact, I thought he was too old the first time.”
A Washington Post story surveyed elder statesmen of the eastern Establishment, several of whom said that they doubted that they’d be able to take on the responsibilities of the presidency at their advanced age. “Even with all my vanity,” said the famed Harvard professor John Kenneth Galbraith, then 75, “I would look forward with some discomfort to four years of the presidency."
All of this may sound familiar if you’ve been reading news stories about Joe Biden in recent months. The emerging conventional wisdom holds that Biden, who turns 80 this November, may be simply too old to seek a second term in 2024. “The age issue will only get worse if Biden runs again,” wrote Mark Leibovich in the Atlantic. “The whispers are becoming shouts.”
Even the recent upswing in Biden’s fortunes, with the presumed passage of his paradigm-shifting climate and health care spending bill, hasn’t quieted the talk. Biden’s successes offer him the opportunity to “ leave on a high, knowing that he has delivered on his promises for progress and restored decency to the White House,” wrote Maureen Dowd this past weekend in a column titled “Hey Joe, Don’t Give It a Go.”
Reagan’s problem, in other words, is now Biden’s problem. A front page piece by Peter Baker in the New York Times had uncanny echoes of the stories about Reagan’s age, right down to the skeptical greybeards. “I have just turned 80,” said Harvard’s David Gergen, channeling Ken Galbraith, “and I have found over the last two or three years I think it would have been unwise for me to try to run any organization.”
For some in the Biden White House, Reagan comparisons are a source of reassurance. Reagan, too, they reason, suffered through a rough economy and low approval numbers while enacting a transformative agenda. And when Reagan sought reelection in 1984, all the talk about the age issue didn’t stop him from winning in a landslide, taking 49 out of 50 states.
That year, Reagan famously dispensed with all the “too old” talk in dramatic fashion at the crescendo of the fall campaign. He had stumbled badly in the first of that year’s presidential debates, often appearing unprepared and confused, leading the worst series of “Is He Too Old?” stories of his presidency.
But in his second debate with Democratic nominee Walter Mondale, Reagan promptly dispensed with the topic by delivering a killer line. You’ve probably seen the clip:
Moderator: I recall that President Kennedy had to go for days on end with very little sleep during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Is there any doubt in your mind that you would be able to function in such circumstances?
Reagan: Not at all… And I want you to know that, also, I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience.
Even Mondale, receiving the final, fatal blow to his campaign, couldn’t help but roar.
But what’s often missed in the admiring remembrances of Reagan’s Mondale debate line is that it didn’t come out of nowhere. It was, in fact, a product of a sophisticated, multi-year strategy that he and his advisers had developed to deflect the age issue. Their playbook had three essential moves:
Defuse the issue by making it a Joke
Spin aggressively about the president’s vigor and health
Shame the press and your opponents if they dare to raise the age issue outright.
Here’s how they pulled off each of these tricks and why I’m skeptical that adopting a similar approach is enough to keep Biden’s age issues at bay.
JOKE
Nora Ephron had a good line about making yourself the butt of the joke:
“When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you. But when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it's your laugh. So you become the hero rather than the victim of the joke.”
Reagan was a master at making himself the hero of jokes about his age. In the run-up to the New Hampshire primary in 1980, rivals like George H.W. Bush tried to suggest that Reagan, nearing age 69, was too old to seek the White House. The Reagan campaign’s response: Throw him a 69th birthday party attended by one thousand supporters with a big red, white and blue birthday cake. The cake had three candles, each one signifying a decade. “This is the 30th anniversary of my 39th birthday,” Reagan explained.
As president, he turned his advancing years into a running bit. In a speech to business leaders, he described efforts to update the nuclear arsenal: “We’ve begun replacing our Titan ICBMs because of their old age.” Stagey pause. “Don’t think what I’m thinking. ” In July 1983 he celebrated the 75th anniversary of the creation of the FBI. “It’s nice to recognize something in Washington that’s older than I am.”
Nancy Reagan got in on the act as well. When, in September 1983, reporters noted that Reagan had started wearing a hearing aid at public events, the First Lady was ready with a laugh line: “Now I can whisper sweet nothings in his ear and he’ll hear me.”
The Reagans, old Hollywood pros, understood that telling everyone you slipped on the banana peel is more than just a defense mechanism; do it right and it becomes a power move. We’ve heard your age concerns – their zingers implied – and we are so unconcerned by them, we’ve made them into a joke.
SPIN
Gearing up for reelection, Reagan’s advisers feigned cool nonchalance about their candidate’s age. “The age issue is a non-issue,” declared James Baker, Reagan’s ultra-polished Chief of Staff, during a Sunday show appearance in the fall of 1983. But the Reagan team’s actions told a distant story. Using their considerable gifts for stagecraft, they constantly produced images that reinforced the president’s vitality, energy and physical prowess.
Their efforts were hardly subtle. A month before announcing his reelection campaign, Reagan penned a Parade magazine cover story on his workout routine. The president was shown pumping iron on the cover; inside a narrative of the presidential fitness regime was dotted with pictures of him chopping wood and crushing leg day in a White House gym. In the piece, Reagan noted that the five pounds added to his official weight since coming to the White House told a misleading story. “Muscle is heavier than fat,” he noted, “and accounts for most of the increase.”
SHAME
If it’s tough to run for president when you’re getting up there in years, it’s also tough to run against an aging president. Raise the age issue too directly and you’re likely to alienate voters, many of whom happen to be senior citizens themselves.
In 1984, Colorado Senator Gary Hart learned that lesson the hard way. Running in that year’s Democratic primary, the 47 year-old Hart’s good looks and youthful energy made a compelling counter to the elderly Republican President. But Hart’s mistake was saying the quiet part out loud. After a pair of surprise primary triumphs over Mondale, Hart tried to seize momentum by proclaiming that his youth made him best suited to take advantage of Reagan’s age in the general election. “What stake does Mr. Reagan have in the future of this country?” Hart asked in a TV interview. “He has, if I may say so, less to look forward to than those of us in our 40s.”
Reaction in the press was not kind. Hart’s comments, said one left-leaning editorial page, made him look like a “wet-behind-the-ears, callous fool.” In his nationally syndicated column, Philip Geyelin of the Washington Post said that Hart’s commentary “makes one wonder if he is old enough to understand what public service – and life itself – is about.”
Reagan, naturally, brushed off Hart’s attacks with a joke. “Is it true,” he asked, “that young Gary Hart is having the wrinkles airbrushed in?” But the Reagan campaign knew its would-be foes had been served a powerful lesson: raise the age issue at your own peril.
So, if Biden chooses to run for a second term, he has Reagan’s playbook as an example of how to do it. But there are several reasons why I doubt Biden will be able to neutralize the age issue the way that Reagan did.
The first and most obvious: Biden lacks the political skill to deploy Reagan’s playbook effectively. As we age, our ingrained habits become more pronounced. Delivering killer one-liners was the habit of Reagan’s life; getting lost in verbal mazes has been the habit of Biden’s. Jokes and clever spin aimed at the age issue won’t work coming from him.
What’s more, it’s too late for Biden to become the hero of age issue jokes. By the time Reagan delivered the killer “youth and inexperience” debate line against Mondale, he had been successfully telling jokes about his age for years. What’s the last age joke you recall from Biden? (What’s the last joke about anything you recall from Biden?)
The shame strategy might yield better results. It’s worked for Biden in the past. In a 2020 primary debate, former San Antonio mayor Julian Castro crudely raised Biden’s age in an exchange over health care asking Biden, “Are you forgetting what you said two minutes ago?” The back-and-forth made Biden look sympathetic; Castro looked like a jerk.
The two men most likely to be the 2024 Republican nominee, Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, are both in the habit of joking about Biden’s supposed sleepiness and senility. These topics play well in the MAGA fever swamps (also known as the mainstream of today’s Republican Party), but they are a dicier bet for a candidate looking to attract moderates. The 43 year-old DeSantis, in particular, runs the risk of alienating swing voters if he hits Biden senior-status too hard.
Still, no matter what Biden’s opponents try, I suspect concerns about age will stick to him in a way they never did to Reagan. Looking back through news clips from the 1984 campaign, I noted one age issue for which Reagan’s aides never bothered inventing a clever defense: the argument that old age comes on unexpectedly, and while Reagan might be perfectly capable of holding the presidency at 73, he might be less capable at age 78. I suspect that Reagan’s aides didn’t float a rebuttal to this argument because there simply wasn’t one. And, indeed, Regan’s cognitive ability did decline in his final years in office; at one point his aides believed he’d grown so “inattentive and inept” they considered invoking the 25th amendment.
The issue is more sensitive for Biden who entered the White House at 78 and, if elected to another four year term, would be serving into the latter part of his ninth decade. “It’s not the 82 that’s the problem,” said one voter in a recent focus group, “it’s the 86.”
It’s a problem for a lot of voters, and no amount of joking, spinning or shaming that can make it fully disappear. If Biden chooses to run for reelection, he will be making a bet that voters’ enthusiasm for his domestic achievements and fear of a revived and authoritarian Trumpist movement outweigh the unanswerable questions about his age.
That bet may be stronger than it seems. It’s rarely recalled, but Reagan’s answer to the age question at that famous 1984 debate had a second part. After delivering his big line— “I am not going to exploit… my opponent’s youth and inexperience…” — he waited for the laughter to subside, took a sip of water and went on:
I might add that it was Seneca or it was Cicero, I don’t know which, that said, ‘If it was not for the elders correcting the mistakes of the young, there would be no state.’
Defeating Trump in 2020, Biden corrected one of the gravest mistakes in American history and helped to preserve the state. His best case for reelection is that, elder or not, he is the only person who can do it once again.
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