WASHINGTON — The age question for presidential candidates is more than four decades old. President Ronald Reagan answered it with a pledge to resign if he became impaired, and later with a clever joke that reset his campaign from a stumbling debate performance to a 49-state landslide and a second term.
Today, Democratic President Joe Biden, 81, is struggling for such a redemptive moment after a disastrous debate performance against Republican former president Donald Trump, 78. Those 90 minutes last week set off alarms among Democrats hoping Biden would keep Trump from returning to the White House — and heightened concern among of how either elderly man would govern a complex nation of more than 330 million people for four more years.described him as often sharp and focused.
Reagan faced the same questions even before he was elected as the oldest president to that point. In 1980, at 69, he pledged to resign if he sensed serious cognitive decline while in office. Neither Trump nor Biden has made a similar pledge, and their campaigns did not respond to requests for comment Wednesday.
Reagan was leading going into the first debate, while Biden and Trump were virtually tied. Onstage,"Biden was terrible out of the gate,” said Jaroslovsky, the founder of the Online News Association.Reagan's operation said he had been tired. There was sniping about the staff overpreparing him, Jaroslovsky said. Biden's team cited fatigue from two overseas trips that had exhausted even younger staffers. It was a bad night, they said. Blame flew at the president's aides.
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