The roiling debate over President Biden’s fitness to continue the campaign — and the more important question about his ability to win against Trump in November — shows no sign of abating, even following a more-or-less on-form performance with occasional flubs (Biden has, of course, always struggled as a public speaker) at the NATO press conference last night.
But enough opinions. Put aside the notions of whether Biden’s performances this week settle the question of whether he has chosen to fight, flee, or freeze; what we want to dig into today is how your experience with aging, whether in yourself or those you care about has informed your perspective in this debate.
When we talked to Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg yesterday, we discussed the idea that Biden’s performance at the first debate triggered such alarm because aging-related decline is so familiar to so many of us. Everyone has seen aging up close and personal: so many of us have felt it ourselves, and nearly everyone has faced the difficulty of understanding or managing it in the people we love.
We are all coming to this question with a wealth of experience. And even if experience isn’t exactly equivalent to expertise (not all of us are neurologists or psychologists or cognitive scientists), it does mean that there’s been an unusual amount of practical background animating the argument around Biden, more than we see with many political issues.
So what do you think? How have your own experiences with aging influenced how you think about the way forward for Biden? And do you think that political analysts, other politicians, and celebrities have been reading their similar experiences into their critiques? And in that, are they warranted? We’d love to know.
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This post was originally published on The.Ink.