Joe Biden knows what you’re thinking. He has seen the stories, too.

He knows he’s too old: 76 years old today, and 78 on Inauguration Day, 2021. He knows that, as a senator representing Delaware for nearly half a century, his extensive ties to the banking, credit, and financial industries are liabilities in an increasingly populist Democratic Party. He knows that his treatment of Anita Hill during Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings, and the dozens of photographs of him being handsy with women over the years, are being scrutinized in a new light. And he knows he was on the wrong side of the crime debate.



Biden, who has yet to announce his candidacy for president, reportedly is weighing two solutions to the problem of his unsavory record. One is to pledge to leave office in 2021, at age 82. The other is to name Stacey Abrams, a black woman 31 years his junior, as his running mate early in the race. Such a “big play,” in the New York Times’ words, “would send a signal about the seriousness of the election, and could potentially appeal to both liberal activists and general-election voters who are eager to chart the safest route toward defeating President Trump.”



But the fact that Biden is even considering these moves only underscores his innumerable flaws, rather than addressing them.



It’s easy to see the appeal of a one-and-done presidency. Biden’s age, like that of the 77-year-old Bernie Sanders, undoubtedly would be a concern for some Americans, given the erratic and seemingly cognitively impaired septuagenarian currently in the White House. Promising to serve only one term could reassure voters concerned about the fact that Biden (and, for that matter Sanders) would become America’s first octogenarian president before the end of his second year in office.

