“[Turning 73] feels like I live in a bad neighborhood and anything can happen.”
- Actor Tony Danza.
As all are aware, it has been reported that former President Joe Biden has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer that has entered his bones. During MSNBC’s May 19 Morning Joe, Dr. Ezekiel Emanual, an oncologist with ties to both the Obama and Biden Administrations, opined that given the reported advanced state of the former president’s condition, Mr. Biden has had prostate cancer for years. I consider any pubic outrage regarding Mr. Biden’s failure to disclose his disease – assuming he knew – to be so much hot air. This would hardly be the first time that a President was less than candid about his health: see Grover Cleveland’s surgically-removed cancerous upper jaw (denied); Woodrow Wilson’s (undisclosed) debilitating stroke; Franklin Roosevelt’s (undisclosed) congestive heart failure; John Kennedy’s Addison’s Disease (dangerous, denied); the extremely critical (undisclosed) nature of Ronald Reagan’s condition after he was shot; Mr. Reagan’s seeming (but never admitted) mental degradation toward the end of his presidency; and the (hidden) significant severity of Donald Trump’s COVID condition.
That said, what has given me pause to reflect is how and when Mr. Biden responded when he learned of his condition. If he knew he had prostate cancer – no matter how slow-growing it is — before he ran for the presidency, at his already-advanced years he shouldn’t have run. If he learned of his condition at any time after taking office, he should have promptly indicated that he would not seek another term (even if he didn’t specify the cause).
Since I am not aware of any medical finding that establishes a link between mental acuity and prostate cancer, I am left with the same final estimation of Mr. Biden’s performance in office that I set forth here during the last week of his presidency: that despite what I consider to be the strongest performance of any president of my lifetime during his first two years in office, my final rating placed him in about the middle, largely due to two factors: that objectively, he had failed “to rid us of Donald Trump,” and that “… he should have recognized in late 2022 that he substantively simply didn’t have the strength to perform his office effectively for another six years, no matter whom the Republicans nominated.”
Which leads to the larger point. I am the same age as Mr. Danza. He, I, and all septuagenarians, no matter how healthy any of us may seem, all live in the same bad neighborhood. We are a full decade younger than Mr. Biden, who lives in a yet more dangerous neighborhood – a neighborhood to which President Trump will soon be moving. I’m willing to venture that if they are honest, the vast, vast, vast majority of septuagenarians – let alone octogenarians — will acknowledge that they are not nearly as sharp or energetic as they were in their primes or even in their sixties. It is, as all fans of The Lion King are aware, simply part of the Circle of Life. Even if Mr. Biden’s cancer didn’t affect his mental acuity, he either refused to admit his mental degradation, or – worse — he failed to recognize his condition.
Among the first list of topics I compiled when launching these pages – many of which I have never posted upon; Mr. Trump’s machinations have tended to crowd out other topics – was Constitutional amendments I would like to see enacted. Here is one that I didn’t include in my list of proposed amendments, but one that I think if proposed could actually garner bipartisan support (since at this point I think Mr. Trump recognizes that even if he attempts to ignore a mere Constitutional prohibition, he doesn’t have the strength to continue in office after 2028):
Section 1 of Article II should be amended to insert the following bolded, italicized text (not the way I’d write it starting from scratch, but attempting to maintain the style of the original 😉 ):
“No person except a natural born citizen … shall be eligible to the Office of the President; neither shall any Person be eligible to or hold that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States, or who has attained the Age of seventy-five Years. …”
For history buffs considering aged politicians of note, under this proposed Constitutional presidential age limitation Mr. Reagan, born in February, 1911, could have served one full term starting in 1981, but would have been required to leave office in early 1986, even if he had won a second term in November 1984 (he obviously would not have run). Mr. Biden, born in 1942, would have been ineligible to serve after his birthday in 2017. Mr. Trump and former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were respectively born in 1946 and 1947, so in 2016 they would have run knowing they could serve one full term, but – putting aside Mr. Trump’s autocratic inclinations – would not have been able to serve a second full term (each would have aged out before 2025). U.S. VT Sen. Bernie Sanders would last have been able to serve a full presidential term ending in 2013, and U.S. MA Sen. Elizabeth Warren would have last been able to serve the full presidential term ending in 2021. Given any presidential aspirant’s desire to serve two terms, from a practical standpoint a 75-year-old age limit would dissuade almost any prospective candidate older than 65 from seeking the presidency.
Too harsh a prescription, you say? After all, Mses. Clinton and Warren and Mr. Sanders still all seem pretty sharp; Mr. Reagan’s 1986 Reykjavik Summit with Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev (when Mr. Reagan was 75) is now considered a turning point in the Cold War; and I have made clear my admiration for what Mr. Biden achieved between ages 78 and 80. Even so, we have seen how the presidency has aged even relatively younger men like Presidents John Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, all elected in their 40s. When you’re older, you wear down relatively faster – you live in the neighborhood where “anything can happen.” President Dwight Eisenhower suffered a heart attack at age 64, during his first term. Political inclinations aside, the presidency has clearly taken a relatively greater physical toll on Messrs. Biden and Trump than it did on Messrs. Clinton and Obama. In a recent post I quoted President Abraham Lincoln to the effect that people are generally little willing to do something for future generations that doesn’t benefit them; in another, I noted TLOML’s observation, based upon her years providing therapy to seniors, that one’s less desirable characteristics do not soften with age, but instead that those of advanced years find it more difficult to temper their regrettable tendencies. Advanced age undoubtedly makes some persons focus on the best for future generations, but it arguably makes others focus on the now, the immediate. Mr. Biden, in addition to his personal warmth, is tough-minded. He might have disregarded the indications of his own mental and physical diminishment in maintaining his 2024 presidential candidacy as long as he did because he had convinced himself that he had a better chance to beat Mr. Trump than any other Democratic Party alternative. As this is posted, Mr. Trump is consumed with forcing a “big, beautiful” bill through the Congress, although credible economists seemingly agree that if passed, the bill – while a boon to Mr. Trump’s wealthy supporters – will provide relatively little tax relief to lower-income Americans – Trump supporters as well as adversaries – while limiting benefits that these lower-income Americans rely upon, and substantially adding to our already-unsustainable federal deficit. This will, in a vicious cycle, ultimately result in further reductions in benefits for lower-income Trump supporters and adversaries alike, while shackling the entire nation to a future debt load even more crippling than we already bear. While some of Mr. Trump’s focus on the bill is arguably Mr. Trump being Mr. Trump at any age – i.e., selfish and short-sighted – one can reasonably suspect that Mr. Trump doesn’t care about our nation’s financial (or, another example, climate) future in part because he knows he’ll be dead before the chickens come home to roost.
We have 370 million Americans. Presumably – speaking as one who under my proposal would age out of the presidency before the end of the current presidential term 😉 — we really should be able to find a sufficient number of suitable presidential candidates between the ages of 35 and 75.
McCoy's Noise 