If President Biden fails to win reelection, his age won’t be his downfall.

To be sure, his age may tip the scales for some voters, as former New Jersey governor Chris Christie said this week in a Washington Post interview. But a larger factor is likely to be the people he counts on as a key part of his base: the college-educated upper-middle class.

The upper-middle class, in the form of college students, threatens to withhold votes from Biden while also riling up millions of moderate voters with their protests of the war in the Gaza Strip.

Neither presumptive presidential candidate can be said to be at the top of his game physically. Biden appears to walk gingerly across the White House lawn. The stutter with which he has grappled all his life still mangles the occasional sentence. And he has always been gaffe-prone.

Anyone who saw former President Trump try to walk down a slight ramp in 2020 at West Point or trudge across the White House lawn after a rally in Tulsa knows he’s in lousy condition. His verbal gaffes, lies and excesses have been fodder for pundits for nearly a decade.

So, insofar as physical ability, 81 versus 78 is, “You pays your money and you takes your chances.”

Democrats have a big edge on the major culture issue of the day, abortion, but they may come up short on other culture-war issues, even if they win the House of Representatives and/or hang on to the Senate, and take Biden down.

Exhibit A. College campuses should be bastions of free thought and free expression. College presidents should lose sleep finding ways to nurture both. Instead, campuses, many at elite schools, are torn by protests of students for whom someone’s paying $70,000 a year or more.

Elite university presidents (Harvard, MIT, University of Pennsylvania) flunked in hearings on Dec. 5 before a House of Representatives committee when asked “whether calls for the genocide of Jews would violate their schools’ conduct policies,” as the Associated Press reported.

Two of the three presidents (Harvard, Penn) lost their jobs when they couldn’t or wouldn’t say that calling for the genocide of Jews should not be tolerated on their campuses. Yes, the hearings were largely a show trial staged by Trumpian U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-New York, but no matter how a campus code of conduct reads, calling for genocide should violate it. Any genocide.

Since December, it has got worse. Students are taking time during what on many campuses is finals week to set up encampments, rally and even threaten other students, especially Jews.

The mood is so toxic that campus rabbis are advising Jewish students to stay home for safety. Crowds of students are chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” a slogan implicitly calling for the destruction of Israel, which was created by the United Nations, with a strong push by U.S. President Harry S. Truman, as a haven for Jews after the Holocaust.

Students attend college at least partly to learn how to make important distinctions. Yet these pro-Palestinians can’t distinguish between Jews and the State of Israel. It’s prudent to support Jews everywhere while abhorring the carnage wrought by the Israeli Defense Forces in response to the Oct. 7 invasion of Israel, when Hamas murdered 1,200 people and captured 200 or so.

Not only students can’t distinguish. Bret Stephens wrote on Tuesday in The New York Times, “At Columbia, nearly 170 professors put their names on a statement suggesting that ‘one could regard’ Oct. 7 as ‘an occupied people exercising a right to resist violent and illegal occupation.’”

Stephens is a small-government conservative columnist and a Jew who grew up in Mexico.

As Yogi Berra may have said, “It’s déjà vu all over again.” We who were on campuses in the 1960s may recall that Richard Nixon responded harshly to campus turmoil and won the election.

Disclosure: I came to oppose the Vietnam war, but I wasn’t a campus protester. Working full-time, taking 40 credits a year and starting a marriage left little time to march or wave signs.

Biden’s situation makes the spot between a rock and a hard place look idyllic. Sometimes he has handled it well, sometimes not. His pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to limit the carnage may have helped a bit, but Netanyahu showed he’ll defy a U.S. president when he snubbed President Obama but addressed a more friendly House of Representatives.

Anyone can see images almost every evening of mounting devastation in the Gaza Strip as the IDF appears to attack Palestinians almost indiscriminately. These pictures likely motivate campus protesters, who say the United States isn’t doing enough to help everyday Palestinians.

Beyond the immediate effect on campus, protests provide platforms for political cynics. On Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson visited Columbia’s campus and called for the president’s head. Nothing in his statement indicates a desire to improve the situation.

Colleges have brought much of this on themselves. A wave of political correctness has swept campuses, to the point that professors sometimes fear to present facts lest the truth be “uncomfortable” for some students. It’s called coddling.

I am “uncomfortable” with the fact that my wife died of a terrible disease. But it is the truth, and we all have to live with the truth.

Bob Neal fears lots of moderates such as himself will vote on the basis of the disaster in the Gaza Strip. That would outweigh the issue of the physical ability of either candidate. Neal can be reached at bobneal@myfairpoint.net.

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