Mitch Heimpel: It's not ageism to worry about Joe Biden's age

There's an assumption that anyone criticizing Biden's age is automatically doing so to Trump's advantage and that is categorically not the case. Trump's old, too!

By: Mitch Heimpel

My Dad fell down the stairs at work this month. 

He's fine. His left arm is a deep, deep shade of purple. But his knees, ankles and hips all survived the crash landing. 

I raise this because it's the first time I've really had to contemplate my dad's mortality. I know what an incredible luxury that is. The man is 65. He's still working. He doesn't have an “off” switch. At age 62, he helped us move into our house, and I don't mean he directed traffic. I mean the old mountain goat was up on the moving truck with me hauling furniture in the dead of January. 

I've never had to contemplate a world where he couldn't do that until this month. It is into that context that I read The Globe and Mail's piece on why concerns about Biden's mental competency are really deep-seeded ageism. I don't mean to pick on the Globe here. These pieces are damn near universal, and getting more frequent. But, like, you have got to be kidding me.

Let's deal with the immediate actuarial question. Is Joe Biden old? According to the Social Security Administration, a man born in 1942 in the United States had a life expectancy of 71.4 years. Biden is 81. So, yes, Joe Biden is old. And, because you have to do this in order to have this conversation, the average life expectancy of a man born in 1946 in the United States is 72.7 years. So, yes, Donald Trump is old, too — he’s 77.

Being old is not necessarily a disqualifier. But it's not unusual for major institutions to have mandatory retirement ages. Canadian senators and Supreme Court justices are both required to retire by age 75. More interestingly for the United States may be this fact. Article two, section two of the United States Constitution makes the president the Commander-in-Chief of the United States military. Title 10 of the United States Code sets a mandatory retirement age for officers in the U.S. military at 64 years of age, while allowing the Secretary of Defence to extend that to 66, and the president can extend it to 68. 

This means that there are no circumstances under which either Joe Biden or Donald Trump could serve as an officer in the military for which both of them are campaigning to be the commander-in-chief. 

(For the record, and just to be a completist, there are also minimum ages for political offices. The Canadian Senate and the United States Senate both require members to be at least 30 years of age. The president of the United States must be at least 35 years old. This is all in spite of the fact that a number of our core mental faculties peak by age 35, and start to decline by our mid forties.)

We know from any number of historical examples from Lincoln to Roosevelt to Reagan about the impacts that the presidency has on aging and stress levels. The National Institute of Health has published comprehensive research on the effect that stress has on aging, and the results are about what you'd expect.

The problem with the kinds of analysis that the Globe published is that there's a reductionist tendency to them. There's an assumption that anyone criticizing Biden's age is automatically doing so to Trump's advantage and that is categorically not the case. Trump can fairly, and accurately, be accused of all the same things that people are eager to accuse Joe Biden of when it comes to his mental fitness to be president. 

That's the key issue. Very few people are at the peak of their capabilities into their eighties. There are examples. Dolly Parton is Donald Trump's age and seems to be as much of an icon as ever. Warren Buffet, more than a decade older than Biden, is still the oracle that much of the financial world turns to for advice and guidance. Neither of these people is in a job that is nearly as stressful as being the president of the United States.

If you can have a minimum age for a profession based on a premise around cognitive development, it is in no way ageist to believe there ought to be a maximum age for a profession for exactly the same reason. I also am under no illusions about the fact that we're only now having these conversations as the Boomers approach their eighties. 

Older people have an incredible value to our society. They are a living chronicle of our history and our culture. There are a number of studies that demonstrate the incredible benefit that grandparents living with grandkids has for both generations. Random discrimination against older people on the perceived basis of any mental decline is, in fact, wrong, and ignores a wide swath of evidence suggesting that we really ought to be supporting older workers. 

None of that supports the number of articles and arguments we have seen urging us to ignore the evidence before our own eyes that Joe Biden (and yes, Donald Trump) are experiencing very real issues with cognitive decline, and it is irresponsible to put either of them at the head of the largest military and economy in the world. "Presidents have a lot of advisors" is likewise not a defence. Not a single presidential advisor is mentioned in the Constitution other than the vice president. If you elect either of these men, you are vesting them and them alone with an immense amount of statutory power that they alone can wield. 

It is up to Joe Biden or Donald Trump to demonstrate clearly and unequivocally that they can withstand the additional four years of unprecedented mental stress that we know the presidency will place on them, and no amount of crotchety press conferences are going to accomplish that. Voters are not required to give them the benefit of the doubt. The onus isn't on the people of the United States of America. It's on the people asking for their vote. 

And it's not ageism to say so.

Mitch Heimpel has served Conservative cabinet ministers and party leaders at the provincial and federal levels, and is currently the director of campaigns and government relations at Enterprise Canada.

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