Such a Fun Age

INSIDE THE PLAN TO CONVINCE VOTERS THAT JOE BIDEN CAN HANDLE FOUR MORE YEARS

- CHRIS SMITH

THEY WERE JUST two short sentences, spoken 72 minutes into a 73-minute speech. But those lines may turn out to be, particularly in 2024, the most significant things President Joe Biden said during his second State of the Union address: “I’m not new to this place. I stand here tonight having served as long as about any one of you have ever served here.”

Those words got the attention of Mike Donilon, sitting in the Capitol audience. Donilon, the administration’s top strategist, has been working closely with Biden for more than 40 years. He knows the way Biden thinks better than just about anyone other than the first lady, Dr. Jill Biden; he had written parts of Biden’s State of the Union speech but not those lines. “He made it up right there,” Donilon tells me later. One key to Biden’s success as president has been playing against the stereotype that he’s a gaffe-prone logorrheic. So the president going off-script was notable—especially on this subject, even when raised cleverly and obliquely. “He’s not,” Donilon says, with careful understatement, “the most inclined to kind of go to talking about his age.”