Age does matter, but the high pitch of so much media noise about the 46th president’s presumed decline ignores the more productive advantages that frequently come with mature leadership.
The New Year began soon after Joe Biden became the first sitting president to turn 80, less to the tune of “Happy Birthday” than to continued pundit prattling from liberal politicians and media about his possible future decrepitude. Might he be vulnerable to the onset of dementia, or to losing a reelection bid due to ageist appeals to voters were he to face a GOP younger than his aged predecessor?
Whether the embarrassing discoveries of classified documents reveals a prosecutable security breach or, more likely, a mere partisan my-pillow fight, remains to grind itself out, until the news cycle hits refresh. Meanwhile, despite the president’s vigorous performance over the past two years, speculation about his potential skid toward some undefined debility continues reverberating through the media like a “Baby Sharks” earworm on a grating replay cycle that distorts what should instead be a substantive examination both of his achievements and more questionable policy decisions.
Age does matter, but the high pitch of so much media noise about the 46th president’s presumed decline ignores the more productive advantages that frequently come with mature leadership. For this observer, the dissonant cries of “Don’t run, Joe” only because of his age have been nerve-fraying. For an aural tune up, this editor decided to clear his ears by streaming into the refuge of—how about, Bach, specifically the sublime recording of the Cello Suite No.1 in G major by the late Pablo Casals.
Prompting me toward Casals was a story I was surprised to reading in Yale gerontologist Becca Levy’s 2022 book, Breaking the Age Code. In it, she recounts the experience of an elderly friend on having witnessed a concert by the Spanish virtuoso, who performed well into his 90s. Despite having trouble walking, once he sat down, Levy’s friend recalled, “Casals became as fluid and graceful as he’d been as a young man.”
Her account struck a personal chord for me; I’d heard a similar account over a half-century ago from my late uncle Theodore Ptashne, who played violin under the maestro for years at the Casals Festival, in Puerto Rico. I was attending University of Minnesota School of Journalism then, and each year on his return, I’d join other family members on a Sunday for my grandmother’s sour cream pancakes, topped with Uncle Ted’s savory tales from the epicenter of classical music.
A Solomonic Decision
Casals was approaching 90, and one year Ted set the scene for us at a welcoming event at the sage musician’s expansive home in San Juan. As orchestra members arrived from many countries, the chatter of colleagues greeting and catching up with one another was building until a sudden hush dropped its baton on the room. Casals, looking especially frail, entered holding tightly to his wife’s arm; ever so slowly they made their way to the grand piano. Ted explained that the renown cellist also played piano brilliantly, but never in concerts. From him, the stage was meant only for the cello. As in Becca Levy’s account, Ted told us, “The instant his fingers touched the keys, he was as vibrant as ever.”
Although the rigor and energy demanded of a musical performance can hardly compare with functioning in the Mount Rushmore shadows of the US Presidency, for Casals, commanding center stage in the cultural world demanded much more than sitting down to lift a bow. Not only did Casals conduct and direct his festival cabinet of administrative and musical organizers, but he traveled internationally, often meeting heads of state and, of greatest important to him, mentoring young talents.
It must have been in 1963, when my uncle returned from Puerto Rico, his eyes agleam, to tell a story that would suspend a boy’s name in my thoughts, until I’d hear it pluck with acclaim years later. Ted explained that leading figures from the world’s string sections arrived at the festival intent on asking the maestro to adjudicate a controversy. A child, whom Casals had singled out for special nurturing when he visited Israel a few years earlier, was, all agreed, “ready.”
Technically, musically, some felt, there was no reason to hold the youth back from the great concert stages of the world. Emotionally, though, others argued, he was still a teenager.
The Solomonic conundrum was laid before Casals. Ted clarified that while he was not in the room for that decisive moment, he was told quickly of Casals’ judgment: “Let him have his childhood. If he is ready now, he’ll be just as ready later.” Let him experience his youth and mature.
I learned years later from Robert Baldoch’s biography of Casals that throughout his adult years, the maestro, although he treasured his fairytale life as a child prodigy, celebrated even by Spanish royalty, he felt that the constant pressure to study and perform deprived him of opportunities to form lasting relationships with people of his own age. A vital consequence for the world of music was that, along with Casals’ acclaim on the concert stage, he became renown off stage as, his biographer notes, “the greatest teacher of the cello” and guide to young musicians.
As my family and I sat absorbed in Ted’s story, I realized he’d omitted one important detail—the boy’s name. It would hover in my mind until I’d hear it ring on the radio years later, like a violinist’s triple: No longer a boy, Pinchas Zukerman was scheduled to solo with the San Francisco Symphony. He’d begun a glorious career.
Although Casals was called on to nurture youths around the globe well into his 90s, while also honing his art to perfection, the judgement of music critics hardly matched the scrutiny endured by the Leader of the Free World.
A musician may be fairly critiqued for today’s performance, but not for what age might bring tomorrow. In politics, though, the essential flaw in defaulting to age bias, or any prejudicial speculation, is that it derails public debate from the complex examination of actual policy decisions and actions. The cacophony of media pundits and late night comedians over President’s Biden’s recent swing to 80 has overwhelmed the plain fact that all of the age-based anxiety, especially from the left, is a matter of conjecture.
Competing Ageist Narratives
Even President Biden’s most ardent Democratic critics have agreed that his performance, though sometimes tongue-tied, has been robust to date. Bolstered by a skilled and experienced staff, particularly compared with the documented mediocrity of the previous administration, the fretting over his age has been entirely provisional: What if the Republican’s nominate a younger presidential candidate in 2024, such as Governors DeSantis or Younkin, who’d be sure to make his elderhood an issue? What if the president wins a second term, which he’d end at 86—beyond the statistical average for frailty or cognitive impairment?
Even journalists who should know better, most recently The New Yorker’s otherwise brilliant Jane Mayer and Jill Lapore, have engaged in handicapping Biden’s prospects based on suppositions that his apparently slowing gait, or mumbling over forgotten names might indicate diminished capacity—and susceptibility to defeat or future feebleness.
At one point in their discussion on the magazine’s radio podcast, Mayer bemoans today’s paucity of congressional leaders in their 40s and 50s. Washington, she says, is mired in a “gerontocracy” of entrenched office holders who won’t “get out of the way” to make way for younger politicians. I was surprised to hear one of journalism’s finest investigative reporters parroting the kind of media fretting that anti-ageism advocates decried and I dissected in LA Progressive last year and then again at exasperated length.
While agreeing with Mayer, at one point, Lapore suggests another factor for the decline in younger candidates may be the personal viciousness of social media. Image that. Elsewhere they note the increase of Black candidates in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. And they could have added the influx of women eager to run for office thanks to Samuel Alito and his gang. As I listened to the New Yorker podcast, I wondered whether they remembered the presidential debate stages of 2016 and 2020, so crowded with many candidates regarded as qualified from their 30s to their 70s. Yet, Mayer, Lapore and their editor bought right into the dubious proposition that progress is being blocked by a cordon of entrenched incumbents, even after significantly changes in the Democratic Party leadership following the mid-term elections. None of them thought to questions whether losing Joe Biden’s incumbency at this point might make the Dems even more vulnerable to a 2024 loss in another electoral free-for-all.
Oddly, journalists and political odds-makers who have bought into the elders-as-barriers narrative have failed to consider the obverse perspective. As one Northern California voter told San Francisco Chronicle columnist Joe Garofoli (Jan. 22, 2023), “With age comes experience.” She added, “And the other thing to think about is what happens when you jump the line before it’s your time.”
That constituent was reflecting on the impending competition for the US Senate seat now occupied by Diane Feinstein, 89, whose reportedly increasing frailty has lead party leaders – and electoral hopefuls – to urge her not to run for reelection in 2024. Earlier in January, Rep. Katie Porter, 49, of Orange County, took the unusual step of announcing her campaign for the office, even though Feinstein is yet to decide whether to campaign again. The next day, Rep. Barbara Lee, 76, of Oakland, a leader of the Congressional Black Caucus, tossed her African Kente-print scarf into the ring. Likely also to be in the running is January 6 House Committee member Rep. Adam Schiff, 62, of Burbank.
It remains to be headlined whether the competing narratives that old office holders are blocking young talent from rising in the Democratic Party, or that the newbies are cutting in on more experienced candidates. What’s evident, is that neither of these patently ageist memes does much to inform the public about what really matters.
Another supporter of Rep. Lee, Kimberly Ellis, told Garofoli, “This is really less about age, and really about the vitality of the agenda that the electeds are championing.” Whomever she supports, news editors and J-school professors would do well to quote her wisdom early and often.
Joe Biden, “Super Ager”
In listening to the New Yorker Radio Hour, I wondered whether Mayer and Lapore had recorded their conversation with editor David Remnick before his separate interview with John W. “Jack” Rowe, MD. Rowe, among the leading gerontological experts in the country, and who previously founded the geriatrics division at Harvard Medical School, placed President Biden among the growing ranks of “Super Agers,” well educated, married, affluent seniors, typically white, with strong social networks.
Regarding the president’s verbal gaffes, his slower gait, or his reliance on staff to devise work-arounds for his misstatements, Rowe commented, “I don’t believe that what we see, which is attributable to his age, is likely to impair his function as President of the United States. . . On balance, I think he’s a very successful and fortunate 80-year-old.”
Remnick probed further about Biden’s potentially diminished functionality toward the end of a second term “closer to 90.” Rowe emphasized, “I’m not trying to paint a picture, which is denying aging; I’m trying to clarify what it is we actually know.” And he should know. Among his achievements, Rowe, 78, long directed the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on an Aging Society and co-authored it’s benchmark 1998 study, Successful Aging, followed by years of detailed research that has revealed sharp variations in life expectancy along economic, racial and other lines.
Rowe explained that averages often cited by writers, such as the elevated percentages of those 85-plus with dementia, fail to account for demographic disparities. When Remnick questioned Biden’s long-term ability to withstand the “fire hydrant” volume of issues hosed at him each day, Rowe observed that those who reach the White House have already differentiated themselves by prevailing in the grueling test of a presidential campaign; they tend to arrive in the Oval Office annealed by experience and buffered by protective advantages of maturity.
Rowe said, “There have been a number of studies recently showing that older people fared much better during Covid than younger people. They had more emotional balance. . . They have less anger, less fear, less sadness. They react less negatively to things that happen in their environment.” He noted research has shown repeatedly that older people tend to “solve disagreements between various parties better than younger people. Younger people strive for justice—in what they view as justice; older people tend to strive for win-win situations.”
Given recent history, of course, individual variation in candidates’ psychology, older or younger, is very much in play now. In either case, a reporter shouldn’t need classified documents to grasp the intelligence of Shakespeare’s King Lear, when Fool advises his Sire, “Thou should not have been old till thou hadst been wise.” (Act I, scene 5)
Pablo Casals’ wise council about music most of a century ago applies, as well to politics, politicians and the journalists who eye them: “Music must serve a purpose, it must be something larger than itself, a part of humanity. . . A musician is also a man, and more important than his music is his attitude to life. Nor can the two be separated.”
The Journalists Network on Generations (JNG), founded in 1993, publishes Generations Beat Online News (GBONews.org).
