As part of a presidential team effort to combat the widely held belief among voters that Joe Biden is too old to serve a second term, his aides have been giving reporters more of a peek at the man they know behind the scenes. His staffers say Biden swears in private, chews out aides who aren’t performing up to standards, and is well versed in the details of complex regulatory issues. According to two accounts, Biden can also get a little spicy, in a Diamond Joe sort of way.
The Washington Post reports that in the early days of his presidency, Biden worried about the loneliness of young people and how they were socializing during COVID lockdowns. “He wanted to know how college students went on dates,” the report states. More directly, Biden wondered how young people could “make love” given the pressure of the unusual times.
His Woody Allen–esque phrasing aside, Biden might have been onto something: The “sex recession” among youths was a noted phenomenon even before the pandemic, and, for many, the isolation of lockdown wasn’t exactly an aphrodisiac.
One gets the sense that Biden can’t really relate. In a famous interview he gave to Kitty Kelley in 1974, Biden rhapsodized about his deceased first wife, Neilia, proclaiming, “She had the best body of any woman I ever saw. She looks better than a Playboy bunny, doesn’t she?” and spoke of how he would “satisfy her in bed” during his first Senate campaign. And according to a new book on the changing role of the First Lady by New York Times White House correspondent Katie Rogers, Biden has joked to staffers that the key to a happy marriage is “good sex.”
Octogenarian sex advice? Surely that will win over the wavering Gen-Z voting bloc.