Washington: People in their 80s lead countries, create majestic art and perform feats of endurance. One entered the record books for scaling Mount Everest.
It's soon time for Joe Biden, 80 on Sunday, to decide whether he has one more mountain to climb — the one to a second term as president.
Questions swirl now, in his own party as well as broadly in the country, about whether he's got what it takes to go for the summit again.
The oldest president in US history, Biden hits his milestone birthday at a personal crossroads as he and his family face a decision in the coming months on whether he should announce for reelection. He'd be 86 at the end of a potential second term.
Biden aides and allies all say he intends to run — and his team has begun quiet preparations for a campaign — but it has often been the president himself who has sounded the most equivocal.
"My intention is that I run again," he said at a news conference this month. "But I'm a great respecter of fate.”
We're going to have discussions about it, he said.
Aides expect those conversations to pick up in earnest over Thanksgiving and Christmas, with a decision not until well after New Year's. Biden planned to celebrate his birthday at a family brunch in the White House on Sunday.
To observe Biden at work is to see a leader tap a storehouse of knowledge built up over a half century in public office as he draws on deep personal relationships at home and abroad, his mastery of policy and his familiarity with how Washington works or doesn't. In short, the wisdom of the aged.
There is something to be said for experience, said Dartmouth College historian Matt Delmont as he noted the dozens of global leaders in their 80s.
But to observe Biden is also to see him walk now often with a halting gait, in contrast to his trotting on stage on election night 2020.
It is to see him take a pass on a formal dinner with other world leaders without a real explanation, as happened on his trip abroad this past week, when he twice spoke of visiting Colombia when he meant Cambodia.
Some supporters wince when he speaks, hoping he gets through his remarks OK.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's decision, at age 82, to pull back from leadership and let a new generation rise may spill over into Biden's thinking and that of his party as Democrats weigh whether they want to go with a proven winner or turn to the energy of youth.
Among the questions Pelosi's move raises, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, an authority on political communications at the University of Pennsylvania: ”Even if one is highly competent and successful, is there a point at which one should step aside to give others the opportunity to lead just as others stepped aside to make it possible for you to do so?
Pelosi's decision makes such questions more salient in the context of Biden's 2020 statement that he was the bridge to a new generation of leaders.
Biden's verbal flubs have been the stuff of legend throughout his five-decade political career, so sussing out the impact of age on his acuity is a guessing game for armchair gerontologists, as Dr. S. Jay Olshansky, an aging expert, puts it.
In the distorted mirrors of social media commentary, every slip is magnified into supposed proof of senility. A moment of silent reflection by Biden in a meeting is presented as the president nodding off.
All of that went into Donald Trump's quiver of falsehoods when he announced Tuesday he will seek the presidency again.
Some allies see Biden's blunders as an increasing vulnerability in the eyes of voters as he's grown older.
In an AP VoteCast survey of the electorate this month, fully 58% of voters said he does not have the mental capability to serve effectively as president.
That was a grim picture of his standing now, not just looking ahead to another potential term. Only 34% said he's a strong leader.
Those findings come alongside notably low approval ratings in league with Trump's at this point of their presidencies.
Two months before the 2020 election, Olshansky, at the University of Illinois, Chicago, published a paper that predicted both Biden and Trump were bound to maintain their good health beyond the end of this presidential term.
Based on a scientific team's evaluation of available medical records, family history and other information, the paper further concluded that both men are probably super-agers, a subgroup of people who maintain their mental and physical functioning and tend to live longer than the average person their age.
Nothing has changed Olshansky's mind about either of them.
While President Biden may chronologically be 80 years old, biologically he probably isn't, he said. And biological age is far more important than chronological age.” He calls Biden a classic example of everything that's good about aging ... and so his age, I think, should be almost completely irrelevant.”
