A note to Joe Biden

Sam Smith – I know what you’re going through with this age thing. As I explain it to folks, being in your 80s is like being a teenager. You don’t know how to do it, nobody shows you how to do it and nobody likes how you do it. So just like a teenager you keep doing it anyway.

Ageism is like a bunch of other isms such as race and sex where a lot of folks define others by just one factor. They forget, for example, that even teenagers can be star athletes or movie stars. Or that Ron DeSantis - more than three decades younger than yourself – can’t come close to you in logic, dealing with those unlike himself, or reasoning in difficult situations. In fact he seems to suffer from premature cognitive impairment.

The logical way to handle this, as with ethnicity and sex, is to analyze the individual rather than just one category to which that individual belongs.

In fact, according to the National Institute of Mental Health:

• In 2021, there were an estimated 57.8 million adults aged 18 or older in the United States with AMI [any mental illness]. This number represented 22.8% of all U.S. adults.
• The prevalence of AMI was higher among females (27.2%) than males (18.1%).
• Young adults aged 18-25 years had the highest prevalence of AMI (33.7%) compared to adults aged 26-49 years (28.1%) and aged 50 and older (15.0%).

In other words, Ron DeSantis is statistically almost twice as likely to be mentally disabled as you are.

You might want to remind him of this.

The other thing, I’d suggest is that given the tendency of Americans to be anti-aging that you come up with a more exciting vice-presidential choice, someone more appealing than Kamala Harris who, despite her virtues, has been unable to excite voters.