There are two new stories out about Joe Biden’s age today and both of them make clear that Democrats are privately very nervous about lining up behind an 80-year-old man who would be 86 by the time he finished a second term. CNN reports discussion of Biden’s age is “omnipresent.”

Biden’s age is “omnipresent” in nearly every conversation, one person involved told CNN, at a time when he’s preparing for a reelection announcement that would try to extend his time in the Oval Office until he is 86 years old…

To many top Democratic operatives and officials looking ahead, Biden’s age is the top issue of his reelection campaign – in essence, what he’s running against, at least until a Republican nominee emerges, according to CNN’s conversations with three dozen White House aides, elected officials, leading Democratic operatives and others beginning to prepare for the race ahead…

Still, voters bring Biden’s age up constantly in focus groups. Many veer toward assuming he must be ineffective or being puppeteered: “‘brain dead,’ ‘mush’ – ‘dementia’ is a word that comes up all the time,” said one person who observed multiple focus group sessions during campaigns last year…

Voters young and old often say they can’t really believe he’s going to run. Mocking him as ancient or asleep has become an easy joke for late night comedians. Many prominent Democrats privately say some panicky version of what Robert Reich, the 76-year-old former secretary of labor, wrote recently: Biden’s age is “deeply worrying, given what we know about the natural decline of the human brain and body.”

The rest of the CNN story does its best to make the argument that worries about Biden’s age are mostly coming from outside the camp. According to CNN, the people who spend time with him are consistently impressed:

Aftab Pureval, the Cincinnati mayor who just turned 40 in September, said a visit from the president last month left him with the impression that Biden has more than enough left in the tank.

Pureval saw a man who laughed hard when the mayor deliberately used a famous Biden interjection – one that contains a four-letter word that starts with F – to describe what a big deal the bipartisan infrastructure money was in helping rebuild the local Brent Spence Bridge.

There were the fist bumps with the crowd at the barbecue spot in town they went to afterward. There was the way the president immediately flashed the fraternity hand sign when a young black man mentioned that he was a member of Phi Beta Sigma.

“When you’re with him, age was never really on my mind. What was on my mind was the president provided the single biggest grant in our nation’s history to our bridge,” Pureval said.

The other story out today about Biden’s age paints a different picture. Writing for Politico, Jonathan Martin said he spoke to lots of high-level Democrats who remain worried about Biden’s age but who are afraid to speak up because the leading alternative, Kamala Harris, is not considered an option:

High-level Democrats are rallying to President Biden’s reelection, not because they think it’s in the best interest of the country to have an 82-year-old start a second term but because they fear the potential alternative: the nomination of Kamala Harris and election of Donald Trump.

Not that many of them will say it publicly, at least not that directly.

“Nobody wants to be the one to do something that would undermine the chances of a Democratic victory in 2024,” Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) explained to me. “Yet in quiet rooms the conversation is just the opposite — we could be at a higher risk if this path is cleared.”…

My conversations with a variety of Democratic lawmakers and a number of the party’s governors, who were in Washington last week for National Governor’s Association’s winter meeting, bear out Phillips’s case that he has ample company in his view of Biden — but that they are as muted about it as he is loud.

There was the senator who said few Democrats in the chamber want Biden to run again but that the party had to devise “an alignment of interest” with the president to get him off the “narcotic” of the office; there was the governor who mused about just how little campaigning Biden would be able to do; and there was the House member who, after saying that, of course, Democrats should renominate the president told me to turn off my phone and then demanded to know who else was out there and said Harris wasn’t an option.

The fact that Harris is considered a non-starter may be the best thing Biden has going for him at this point. As Martin puts it, it’s easier to fall in line behind Biden than it would be to answer the very next question aimed at anyone who chooses not to do so: “Well, are you for the vice president?” Martin doesn’t spell out why that question would be so difficult but the answer is obvious. She’s the first woman Vice President and the first minority Vice President. Anyone who tried to sidestep Harris as the heir apparent would risk being attacked as a misogynist and a white supremacist. Under those circumstances, it’s just easier to side with Biden even if you privately think he’s too old for the job.