As President Biden gears up for a star turn on the world stage at the G7 summit, concerns are rising at home in respect of the age — and, potentially, fitness for office — of the chief executive. More than 60 House Republicans are even asking Mr. Biden to be evaluated as to his “current cognitive state and ability to serve another term as President.” It’s a problem anticipated by the Framers, who anticipated the need for “energy in the executive.”

We speak of Alexander Hamilton’s famed essay known as 70 Federalist. It declares that a “feeble Executive implies a feeble execution of the government.” Mr. Biden waves off the qualms about his age, saying it “doesn’t register with me.” Yet his approval rating has “hit a career low,” per the latest ABC News/Washington Post survey, and 68 percent of Americans see him as “too old for another term as president.” Could these two findings be related? 

“A feeble execution is but another phrase for a bad execution,” Hamilton added, “and a government ill executed, whatever it may be in theory, must be, in practice, a bad government.” By contrast, the future Treasury Secretary wrote, “all men of sense will agree in the necessity of an energetic Executive.” Hamilton was just over 30 when he made these observations, so he could be forgiven for favoring youthful vigor in the operations of the government.

The same could be said of President Kennedy, who was age 43 when elected, taking the reins from President Eisenhower, 70. In 1962 JFK, in Sports Illustrated, touted a physical fitness program and traced a “subtle but undeniable relationship of physical vigor” to the “capacity to undertake the enormous efforts of mind and courage and will” that he saw as “the price of maintaining the peace and insuring the continued flourishing of our civilization.”

Hamilton’s conception of the energetic executive was vindicated by the tenure of the first man to hold the office, George Washington, who was a spry 57 when he was elected. Hamilton saw an energetic president, like Washington, as “essential” to protect the nation from “foreign attacks” and preserve property rights “against those irregular and high-handed combinations which sometimes interrupt the ordinary course of justice.”  

Hamilton envisioned a vigorous president vouchsafing “the security of liberty against the enterprises and assaults of ambition, of faction, and of anarchy.” Yet he also reassured that “a vigorous executive” wouldn’t impair “the genius of republican government.” To that end he was careful to distinguish between a president’s personal qualities and the institutional checks that would prevent any recourse to “the absolute power of a single man.”

In the case of Mr. Biden, it’s hard to avoid the sense of having the worst of both worlds — a leader who lacks Hamiltonian vigor, yet also seeks to contravene the limits the Founders placed on presidential prerogatives. Take, say, his drive to usurp the Congressional power of the purse and forgive hundreds of billions of dollars in student loans. Or his talk of invoking the 14th Amendment to start borrowing money without Congress.

“It’s hard to ignore the toll of Biden’s years,” the New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg says, “no matter how hard elected Democrats try.” The Timeswoman notes that “the more sympathetic you are to Biden, the harder it can be to watch him stumble over his words.” While in 2020 he could get away with a virtual campaign, she writes, he’ll have no such luck in 2024. It’s “a herculean task for a 60-year-old and a near impossible one for an octogenarian.”

“If he runs again, Mr. Biden will need to provide explicit reassurance to voters,” the Times’ editors wrote in an editorial the other day, noting he hadn’t put to rest worries over his “cognitive abilities.”  The Gray Lady put Mr. Biden on notice that voters are “worried that he will simply be too old to be effective,” and, in an observation that would have pleased Hamilton, that they “expect the president to reflect the nation’s strength.”