President-elect Joe Biden turned 78 on Friday. In two months, he will take the reins of a politically fractured nation facing the worst public health crisis in a century, high unemployment and a settling of accounts over racial injustice.
As he struggles with those issues, Biden will try to accomplish another feat: showing Americans that age is just a number and that he’s up to the job.
Biden will be sworn in as the oldest president in the nation’s history, displacing Ronald Reagan, who left the White House in 1989 when he was 77 years and 349 days old.
The president-elect spent his birthday in Delaware working on the transition of government, including a meeting with the two top Democrats in Congress: Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer. During the closed-door portion of the meeting, Pelosi gifted Biden with a white orchid, one of her signature flowers, an attendee said.
The age and health of both Biden and President Donald Trump, less than four years younger than Biden, were glimpsed throughout a career that was decided by a younger and more diverse electorate and at a time when the nation did not faces a shortage of major problems.
Outside the gate, Biden will be eager to show he has the stamina to serve.
“It is crucial that he and his staff are positioned early in his presidency where he can express what he wants with a clarity that has not always been his strength,” said Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University who has Advised legislators of both parties. “You have to gain credibility with the American people that you are physically and mentally ready for the job.”
Throughout the campaign, Trump, 74, did not miss an opportunity to highlight Biden’s mistakes and argue that the Democrat lacked the mental sharpness to lead the nation. Both critics and some Biden supporters worried that he was sending the wrong message about his resistance by keeping a relatively light public schedule as Trump rampaged through battle states. Biden attributed his light schedule to being cautious during the coronavirus
pandemic.
Some of Biden’s rivals in the Democratic primaries also defended age, while skipping Trump’s vitriol, by raising the question of whether someone from the generation of Biden and Trump was the right person to lead a nation that deals with issues. like climate change and race. inequality.
Brian Ott, a Missouri State University communications professor who studies presidential rhetoric, said Biden was not impressive as an activist, but he has proven much more effective with his public comments since Election Day.
Ott said Biden’s victory speech was moving and his empathy was shown in a virtual discussion he had earlier this week with frontline healthcare workers. The president-elect’s experience, a combination of age and nearly 50 years in politics, is conveyed more clearly through the prism of government than through campaign chaos, he said.
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