By Chris Satullo

Over the past week, a gazillion words have been spilled about this topic: Joe Biden is old. What should he do about that fact? What should we?

I’m going to spill a few more now, but only because I think I can do two helpful things:

—  Share some perspective from someone who’s known Biden since long before he could be derided by the unkind as senile.

— Save you some time by pointing you towards the three wisest, most useful pieces about Joe’s oldness that I read this week. 

I’ve known Biden for a while. Joe, you may have heard, is from Delaware. From 1994 to 2015, I served as a high-level editor in two news organizations – the Philadelphia Inquirer and WHYY public media – that had Delaware as a traditional, if underserved, part of their coverage area. In both places, I got to be around Biden fairly often.

At the Inquirer, I was a leader of the paper’s editorial board. During that time, it was Joe’s custom to visit us several times a year in his dual capacities as U.S. senator from the Blue Hen state and as a global affairs maven who adored jawing with Trudy Rubin, the paper’s brilliant columnist on that beat.

While Biden was vice president, I ran WHYY’s news division. A little-known fact: WHYY, though based in Philadelphia, holds its license as a PBS broadcaster through the city of Wilmington. For that reason, it maintains a television studio in Wilmington.

During the Obama era, that studio – and Biden’s well-known penchant for returning home to Wilmington on many work nights – combined to keep WHYY fiscally afloat. It seems quaint now in the Zoom era, but back then, whenever the cable news channels wanted to do a “hit” with Biden to get his take on some issue, he’d do it from our studio. And CNN, MSNBC et. al. would pay us handsomely for helping them put Biden on their air.

Having done editorial board meetings and studio sessions with Biden over those two decades, I feel I can say the following things about our president with some confidence:

—  He’s always been garrulous, prone to wandering anecdotes and malapropisms.

— In the kingdom of hollow people known as politics, he’s always been unusual – for being a truly kind, decent, well-grounded, other-directed human being. Not without his moments of peevishness, but who among us doesn’t have those?

All you had to do was to watch Biden before one of his studio hits at WHYY. He’d interact eagerly with the tech staff, remembering their names and how many kids they had, joking with one about how long the priest’s sermon had been at Catholic Mass the Sunday before. You could tell that, with him, friendliness and decency were not just a pose, a curated piece of his “brand” to be displayed only when cameras were on. As a mensch, he was the real deal.

Similarly, to see him joyfully joust over global issues for an hour with Trudy – a woman who never courts favor by pretending to agree when she doesn’t – was revealing. It showed how much Biden a) relishes digging deep into practical policy and b) earnestly seeks out the candid opinions of people whose expertise he respects.

Those traits – grounded-ness, humility, decency, love of policy and respect for divergent opinion – are hugely important traits in a chief executive.

And they are traits which his equally aged opponent in this election possesses not at all.

Do I wish Joe had decided just to claim his laurels for a remarkably successful term and ride off into the Rehoboth Beach sunset, ceding his place on the ballot to, say, Gretchen Whitmer? I kinda do. Do I think he should still consider that step before the sands in the primary season hourglass run out? Maybe, not sure.

Here’s what I’m sure about: Joe Biden is right now being most unfairly abused. In a president, wisdom, decency and authentic love of country matter far more than perfect recall of random names or the ability to hustle around a pickle ball court without mishap.

Joe Biden’s storehouse of those good traits dwarfs Donald Trump’s tiny supply. Ditto all the toxic nincompoops in the U.S. House’s clown caucus as they thrash about fecklessly seeking some pretext to impeach the president.

I’m also sure that, as political commentators raced this week to hyperventilate about special counsel Robert Hur’s gratuitous jabs about Biden’s faulty memory, many of them completely missed the biggest news in that document: 

While Biden did err in his handling of classified documents from his time as veep, he reported and rectified those mistakes in exemplary fashion. By contrast, Hur wrote, in Trump’s handling of classified materials, the former president stubbornly and culpably obstructed justice.

Here’s one last thing I know. At least three writers have recently spoken great good sense re: the case of Joe Biden v. the Aging Process.  I hereby recommend their work to you:

—  Yair Rosenberg nailed the case in The Atlantic that we all, no matter our age, fumble facts and memories more than we care to admit. He points out that even some pols currently leading the kangaroo court against Biden have recently committed name-recall blunders as bad as any of his.

— Remember that famous definition of a political gaffe: It’s when a politician accidentally tells the truth. On his blog, Matt Yglesias makes the interesting, and to me quite plausible, case that the real reason Biden’s staff is shielding him from the media is not that he’s non compos mentis, but that they are afraid he might say out loud what he really thinks. And what he thinks, Yglesias suggests, violates the precious, progressive shibboleths to which these young know-it-alls, fresh from their Ivy League law schools or think-tank jobs, genuflect. On climate change, on abortion, on guns, on the border, Yglesias says, Biden’s reality-honed, legislatively savvy centrist views are far more popular with vital swing voters than the stances now fashionable on the left. In so shielding the real Biden from public view, Yglesias argues, his staff may be sorely damaging his chances of winning.

— Finally, my pal Jonathan V. Last thoroughly nails the tone and the substance of the speech Biden should give to put the age issue to rest as thoroughly as Ronald Reagan’s famous line in his 1984 debate with Walter Mondale — I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience — once did.

Thanks for indulging these ramblings from a cranky old septuagenarian.  You know how we old white guys are.

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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia