Why Biden’s Age Isn’t “Hillary’s Emails”

The better analogy is to the campaign of 1944, FDR’s last.

Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.

Many months after some of us thought it should, and in the wake of the report of the special counsel on his handling of classified documents, the press has finally recently turned to the subject of President Biden’s age and its impact on his fitness for another term. The reaction from some quarters, most notably some center-left commentators and the White House itself, has been furious, and the shorthand has often been to compare the attention to that paid in 2015-16 to Hillary Clinton’s private email server.

This week I want to explain why I continue to think we need more, not less, reporting on Biden’s age, and why the Clinton analogy is inapt.

Still a reportable question

The first question, of course, remains whether Biden is physically up to his job. I continue to insist that that is a reportable matter—an argument I laid out here last October. I still hope some reporters and editors can find the time and muster the courage to tell us the answer.

Next, we come to Special Counsel Robert Hur. What most criticism of his report and the resulting coverage misses is this: Biden acknowledged to Hur, under oath, that he knowingly took a few classified documents with him when he left office as vice president. Then he admitted he knowingly shared them with someone without security clearance, his ghostwriter. We can debate whether that should be illegal, but there is no question that it seems to violate the plain meaning of a federal statute.

Former Bill Clinton national security adviser Sandy Berger took copies of a single classified report from the National Archives and later lied to authorities about doing so. He was forced to plead to a criminal misdemeanor and lost his law license. It’s true that Berger’s lying—just as Donald Trump lied and obstructed with respect to his own mishandling of classified material—is a key distinction from Biden’s conduct. But Hur noted this in his report, which has a passage seemingly supportive of the Trump prosecution.

The law doesn’t limit criminality in these matters to cases where people also lie about it, so Hur needed to justify his own decision not to prosecute on other grounds as well. Shaky memory fit the bill. What else would critics suggest? That small violations of persnickety laws deserve a free pass? Is that a view Trump’s opponents in the commentariat should want to embrace?

FDR campaigning in 1944

A better analogy

Before addressing the Hillary Clinton analogy, let me offer a different one for the present moment. In 1944, as Franklin Roosevelt prepared to run for the fourth time, everyone close to him knew that he was desperately ill and very unlikely to be able to serve out the next term. His doctors and family kept his diagnosis with congestive heart failure from the American people, and his political associates jockeyed over the vice presidential nomination, ultimately engineering the selection of Senator Harry Truman over incumbent Vice President Henry Wallace. The press reported little to nothing about the President’s health, even as he was dying before their eyes.

In the event, FDR served less than three months of the term to which he was elected, and was greatly diminished at the crucial Yalta conference in the third week of that term, with historic consequences. While Truman is generally ranked as a near-great president, and Wallace would likely have been a disaster, the summer of 1944 is hardly a model for how politics or press coverage should be conducted.

The press is following the voters this time

Now to Hillary Clinton. First on this it needs to be said that her use of a private server for official business in order to evade congressional oversight and subvert the Freedom of Information Act—which is certainly what she did, even though there was precedent—was wrong. But it was hardly among the most important things the American people needed to know about in 2016, it was surely not criminal or disqualifying, and it received too much attention from both the Department of Justice and the press.

results of a Daily Mail survey when voters were asked to name one word for Biden— eight months before the special counsel report

With that said, FDR in 1944 remains the better analogy, because if what the American people already think about Biden is true, the problem is arguably disqualifying and they are being asked to elect two presidents at once—and without a chance to adequately vet the second, Kamala Harris.

Moreover, the process to date is unfair not only to the voters but also to the Vice President. Her abortive 2020 campaign was disappointing and her vice presidency has seemed to many lackluster. There have been a few recent in-depth profiles, although they received little notice. But if Biden will step aside, Harris would get the chance she deserves—against other contenders—to face pervasive press coverage of her own, make her case, and either surprise the politicians and Beltway insiders, or give way to a more effective candidate.

Next, we come to the point that neither the Hur report nor the ensuing coverage launched the concern on the part of voters about Biden’s age and fragility. Every poll has shown for many months that it was already prevalent. That is ultimately the crucial distinction from the Clinton email press fiasco: With Biden, the coverage is following the voters, not leading them.

Lastly, whataboutism

Is Biden’s age a bigger issue than Trump’s corruption or Trump’s authoritarianism? Not for me, and I hope also not for press coverage. That, however, seems beside the point, at least until and unless Biden is actually nominated. The alternative argument amounts to saying that Trump is so awful that we should talk of nothing else, cover nothing else, ignore everything else. That may ultimately be history’s verdict of what American voters should do in November, but it is not the role of journalism this Winter, Spring or Summer.

If we get to the Democratic Convention in August, and voters are truly left with what most clearly regard as this dismal choice, we also will have arrived at the phase of the campaign where enterprise coverage is least important. If we have by then fully reported out the Biden age story, journalists could and should move on.

But let’s be clear: if we really do believe in democracy, and the majority of voters this Fall are convinced (perhaps accurately) that one of the two candidates cannot physically fulfill the duties of the job they are seeking, we should not be surprised if they choose the other, even if most journalists continue to report (again accurately) that such a choice could prove fatal to democracy itself.

Second Rough Draft will likely be off next week. See you soon.