At the start of the recent Wellfleet Community Forum, Sheila Lyons informed the large crowd that had come to talk about the precarious state of town government that Irene Daitch had died the day before. Irene was 100 years old, Sheila said, adding, “But she was a young 100.”
Indeed, she was. As noted in her obituary in last week’s issue (which featured a gleeful photo of Irene with a gigantic spritzer), she helped spearhead a major fundraising campaign in recent years for Outer Cape Health Services. She cut the ribbon at the opening of OCHS’s new Wellfleet center with characteristic verve at age 95.
Irene Daitch’s example got me thinking about what has become the central issue in this year’s presidential race: whether Joe Biden is too old at 81 to continue as chief executive. A recent New York Times and Siena College poll found that 73 percent of registered voters say Biden is too old to be effective. A majority even of those who voted for him in 2020 now feel that way, posing “a deepening threat to his re-election bid,” according to the Times.
Just a few weeks before that, Justice Dept. Special Counsel Robert Hur, in a report on Biden’s mishandling of classified documents, described the president as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Ouch. (Hur is a Republican who served in Donald Trump’s Justice Dept.)
I’m rather mystified by the relentless focus on Biden’s age. At 81, he is undeniably an old man. By that age, many people are not just diminished or enfeebled, they’re actually dead. But we all know plenty of people in their 80s and even 90s who are healthy, vigorous, and quick-witted. There’s an enormous range of energy and mental capacity in old age. And judging from Biden’s performance at his State of the Union speech last week, he’s still remarkably robust and clear-minded.
He stumbled over some of his words, which he’s always done. Trump was quick to make fun of his stutter. “I’m gonna bring the country tuh-tuh-tuh-together,” he said at a rally in Georgia, caricaturing Biden. A spokesman said later that Trump was “clearly talking about Crooked Joe Biden’s mental state.” Stuttering, of course, is unrelated to intelligence.
But advanced age, as Irene Daitch showed us, is often related to wisdom. In a 2016 speech to the American Institute for Stuttering, Biden said, “I learned so much from having to deal with stuttering. It gave me insight into other people’s pain, other people’s suffering.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s age — he’ll be 78 in June — doesn’t seem to have registered with most voters. “Donald Trump is not an old man,” says Kari Lake, a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Arizona. “His cognitive abilities are unlike anything I’ve ever seen.” I can’t argue with her on that.
And so it looks like we will be faced this November with a choice between a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man and a cruel, vindictive, elderly man. Not a tough choice.
