‘All we can do is be fair’: Reporting on age and acuity in politics
Isolated and magnified, incidents that seem to show politicians of both parties struggling with the effects of aging can feed a storyline that’s incomplete. Our Washington bureau chief outlines the keys to delivering a fuller picture.
For the first time in American politics, age is emerging as a dominant concern in how the public views – and the press covers – political leadership. In recent polls, 75% of Americans say that President Joe Biden is too old to serve for a second term, and half say the same for his leading rival, former President Donald Trump.
“We’re talking about Joe Biden’s age more than just about anything else,” says Linda Feldmann, the Monitor’s Washington bureau chief. “And so it’s become the raging issue of the day.
“People just jump on every public sign they can get that he’s not mentally sharp,” Linda says on our “Why We Wrote This” podcast. “If the president trips going up the steps of Air Force One, that is captured on video and replayed mercilessly, particularly by conservative media.”
The death Thursday of Dianne Feinstein, the oldest member of Congress, is another reminder of the age question. The California lawmaker had recently faced calls to step down over questions about her mental acuity.
In the past, skillful politicians managed to disarm the notion that age equals frailty with a clever quip or self-effacing humor, as when Ronald Reagan told a 1984 debate audience he would not “exploit ... [his] opponent’s youth and inexperience.”
But given the capacity of the press and social media to amplify lapses, every stumble in the 2024 campaign risks owning the daily news narrative. If there’s a cellphone in every pocket, vulnerability on the campaign trail is hard to hide and any gaffe risks becoming a meme.
“There’s nothing that compares to being in the presidency of the United States,” Linda adds. “The entire world is watching. It just makes the age issue probably more important than it should be.”
Episode transcript
Gail Chaddock: The average age of U.S. presidents on Inauguration Day is 55. The last two presidents were the first to take the oath of office in their 70s. Three-quarters of Americans now say that President Biden is too old to serve for a second term. Half now say the same for President Trump. Does age matter?
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Chaddock: This is “Why We Wrote This.” I’m this week’s guest host, Gail Chaddock. We’re talking with Linda Feldmann, the Monitor’s longtime White House correspondent, Washington bureau chief, and host of the newsmakers’ Monitor Breakfast. Linda, very glad you could join us.
Linda Feldmann: Hi Gail, glad to be here.
Chaddock: Linda, does the Monitor have a policy on reporting on age? If so, how does it affect your reporting and your writing?
Feldmann: The Monitor does have a policy on that. Just to make sure I had it completely straight, I asked our editor, Mark Sappenfield. And he said that we believe that focusing on age has the effect of playing into narratives about age, and we generally don’t want to do that. But in some cases, like with the story that I wrote the other day about aging politicians, it was important for clarity to specify exactly what kind of age we’re talking about. So we do use ages when they’re essential to the story, and then we’re just using more general characterizations when it’s not.
Chaddock: You’ve covered every presidential election since 1996. Does age matter?
Feldmann: It often doesn’t, because we haven’t had such old presidents. But both President Trump and Biden now were, in their time, record old presidents. We’re talking about Joe Biden’s age more than just about anything else. We had that recent incident with Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader, who froze in public, and he’s older than President Biden. And that, to the great frustration of Democrats, that brought back the question of whether Joe Biden really should be running for re-election. The presidency ages the best of them. We saw Barack Obama go gray. We saw him get wrinkles as a relatively young man. The polls are very strongly urging Biden not to run again. It’s almost too late for him to decide not to run. And so we’re going to be hearing a lot about age, between now and election day.
You have, of course, Nikki Haley, who’s running for the Republican nomination, who wants anybody over the age of 75 running for president to undergo a mental acuity test. She’s looking at both Donald Trump and Joe Biden. So it isn’t just the media, or the public who are obsessing about age, it’s also the Republican field. Vivek Ramaswamy is 38, a lot of people think that’s too young. The Constitution says the president must be at least 35 years old.
Chaddock: We have a number of senior politicians. Biden at 80, McConnell at 81, Trump at 77. Is it unusual to have this sort of critical mass of senior politicians at the same time?
Feldmann: It is. It’s unprecedented. And I should add that, in some ways, we shouldn’t be all that surprised. People are living longer than ever before. There are plenty of examples of people continuing to work well into their 80s. I mean, look at Chuck Grassley, senator from Iowa since 1981. He won re-election and immediately filed to run again in 2028. So he’s 90, and if he does run again in ’28, and fulfills that term, he’ll be over 100 by the time he finishes his term. The thing about the Senate, it’s dubbed “the most exclusive nursing home in the country.” You know, that’s a joke, but there’s something to that. I mean, senators have legions of aids. They have people scurrying about getting them anything they could possibly need, putting out press releases, so they don’t need to be completely sharp to continue to serve in the Senate.
I should also point out that Nancy Pelosi, she and her top deputies were all in their 80s, as the top leadership of the Democrats in the House. And they decided as a group to step down from leadership. Not to resign their seats, but to stop being in leadership. She even stated that the decision to step aside was for the purpose of elevating the next generation. Congresswoman Pelosi has said she’s now running for re-election at the age of 83, which, honestly, doesn’t surprise anybody. She’s very vigorous. She’s mentally sharp. There’s no reason for her not to run and continue her role as an important representative of her state and a key spokesperson for her party.
Chaddock: Linda, you mentioned earlier, with reference to senators, that they have staff. What do you see the Biden team accomplishing, in accommodating his needs?
Feldmann: The Biden White House is very buttoned up. He has a tight team around him. They just don’t leak. They will often speak for him, and if he says something that might come across as off key, they will immediately put out a statement correcting what the president has said.
We look at his schedule every day. They put it out the night before. He usually doesn’t do events before 10 in the morning. He sometimes will have a pretty light public schedule, whether that’s by his request or if that’s his team preemptively protecting him.
There’s this narrative around President Biden that he’s almost a puppet of his team. When Ron Klain was his chief of staff, Republicans would refer to him as Prime Minister Klain. People just jump on every public sign they can get that he’s not mentally sharp. If the President trips going up the steps of Air Force One, that is captured on video, and replayed mercilessly, particularly by conservative media. There’s this whole narrative that he’s full-on senile, which, honestly, I just don’t see. I serve in the presidential pool. I travel with President Biden from time to time, have seen him up close at the back of Air Force One chatting off the record with the pool. I have interacted with Joe Biden in person. He was sharp, he was personable. Joe Biden is a people person, he loves to interact with everybody. It’s in some ways I’m sure difficult for him to have to be so guarded in public.
Chaddock: You also saw President Trump up close. The two men are about three years apart, and yet most of the focus on age is directed at President Biden and not at President Trump. Do you think there’s any reason for that?
Feldmann: Well, part of it is just how they come across in public. So Joe Biden definitely moves like an old man, and he doesn’t speak fluidly. But he never has. As you well know, Gail, he’s always struggled with public speaking. He had a childhood stutter, which he still contends with. He’s famously known as a gaffe machine.
Donald Trump also has a very particular way of speaking, a very circuitous way of speaking, but just in terms of his physical presence, he comes across as more vigorous and forceful than Joe Biden does. Also, Donald Trump isn’t president. I mean, there’s nothing that compares to being in the presidency of the United States. The entire world is watching. It just makes the age issue probably more important than it should be.
Franklin Foer’s new book on the first two years of the Biden presidency describes a President Biden who’s very engaged, behind the scenes with policymaking. One of the headlines out of that was that Joe Biden, quote, “gets tired from time to time.” But my reaction was: “Well, don’t we all?” And even on President Biden’s recent trip to the other side of the world, he gave this press conference in Hanoi, which honestly didn’t go all that well. And he, at one point, he ended it by saying, it’s time to go to bed, which, I’m thinking: “If I’d been on that trip, I would have had the same reaction.”
You know, if anybody asks him about his age, his answer is always something to the effect of: “Watch me.” This is a determined man. He’s determined for Donald Trump not to become president again, and I think that is what animates him, as well as his devotion to his family more than anything else.
Chaddock: You know, at your urging, I actually read Franklin Foer’s “The Last Politician.” There’s a really interesting line in it: “A press corps suffering from post traumatic stress disorder welcomed the relative professionalism of the Biden communications operation. With such favorable treatment, there was little rush for the White House to subject Biden to a ceremonial grilling, which would present endless opportunities for unintentional headlines.” When Trump supporters see that soft coverage and compare it with what their guy received in the opening months, does it look unfair to them? How do you process that?
Feldmann: So it may be true that in the very early going, there was a bit of a honeymoon period. There always is with a new president. And with Joe Biden, for sure, there was a sharp return to normality. His press secretary holds daily briefings, which the Trump press teams stopped doing for about nine months. Those briefings are an important daily opportunity for reporters to ask questions, both on the record and on camera. But the Biden presidency is also unusual in that he’s held fewer formal press conferences and sat for fewer interviews than most of his modern predecessors. That may reflect an effort by his team to shield him from potential gaffes, but at the same time, he takes far more questions from reporters in impromptu settings than his predecessors did. For example, when he’s on the South Lawn walking to or from Marine One, or at Joint Base Andrews walking to or from Air Force One, he’ll take questions, which he may or may not answer.
Chaddock: I’m looking back before your time to JFK, John F. Kennedy, the youngest elected American president. And yet we find out later with books and the release of medical records that he was dealing with very serious physical problems all along. Yet the press largely described him as, you know, vigorous, active. Did they know, and just not report it? What do you feel that a journalist owes the public in terms of reporting on presidential health?
Feldmann: Right, so with John F. Kennedy, this was before Watergate, when the relationship between the press and the president was completely different. They were kind of a club. Basically a men’s club. And the press knew all kinds of stuff. They knew that John F. Kennedy was having affairs. And I’m not sure if they knew the health issues he was dealing with, but they certainly knew more than they reported.
Ever since Watergate, that level of trust between reporters and the president has gone forever. One thing that’s common between both Republican and Democratic presidents is they both are very, very leery of the press. With Joe Biden, he is continuing all the conventions of presidential coverage. I think all we can do as reporters is be fair, report accurately what he’s saying and doing, and not try to cover for him in any way, or be unfairly mean, or make things up.
Chaddock: I know you don’t cover the Supreme Court, but your presidents suggest Supreme Court nominees every once in a while. And think of some of the justices that have really distinguished themselves at very old ages: Oliver Wendell Holmes, retired at 90, Louis Brandeis at 82.
Feldmann: Well, the Supreme Court question around age is very tricky. We, of course, had the example of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who served until the age of 87, at which point she passed away. People are perhaps regretting that she didn’t retire while President Obama was in office so that he could nominate her replacement. Instead, Donald Trump had that opportunity, and put in Amy Coney Barrett, who then contributed to the majority that overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling that established nationwide legal abortion.
Should justices have a mandatory retirement age? I actually did a little research on this and I discovered that most states have retirement ages, typically, 70, 72, 75. And this made me laugh: in North Dakota, a judge who does not retire at 73 loses all earned retirement benefits. So there’s an incentive to retire at 73.
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Chaddock: Linda, thank you for joining us for this podcast. And thanks to our listeners. You can find more, including our show notes, at csmonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis. This episode was hosted by me, Gail Chaddock. Edited and produced by Clay Collins, Jingnan Peng, and Mackenzie Farkus. Tim Malone and Alyssa Britton were our engineers, with original music by Noel Flatt. Produced by the Christian Science Monitor. Copyright 2023.
