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Let's talk about age and the Presidency, shall we? Democratic Presidential candidates are gathering to debate tonight in Houston, so the subject is timely. First, a couple of historical notes. This will be a thread.
2. First, the last five newly elected Democratic Presidents (that is, excluding Truman and Lyndon Johnson, who were already President when they ran for election) included three men in their 40s (Kennedy, Clinton, Obama) and two in their early 50s (Franklin Roosevelt, Carter).
3. Second -- and again, excluding incumbent Presidents -- a Democratic Presidential candidate has beaten a younger Republican twice: once in 1912 (Wilson, slightly older than both Theodore Roosevelt and Taft) and 1856 (Buchanan).
4. Today, the Democratic part of the electorate skews younger; the Republican part skews older. Youth has been an electoral advantage for Democratic Presidential candidates historically; it should be an advantage today, particularly with an elderly Republican incumbent.
5. Yet polls show the three leading Democratic Presidential candidates now are all people in their 70s. This is a remarkable fact. It's not been commented on enough.
6. This may be b/c other candidates & journalists fear offending older voters by suggesting an older person may not be up to the rigors of the Presidency for four years. What I'd like to suggest is....an older person may not be up to the rigors of the Presidency for four years.
7. The President we have is not. Donald Trump maintains the work schedule of an affluent retiree, full of bad TV, golf and chatting with friends. He is sedentary and fat. He neglects his duties for leisure. He shows evident cognitive decline and erratic behavior.
8. I'm perfectly willing to be fair. These last observations do not apply to either Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. And it is certainly possible for people to assume very large responsibilities late in life: Churchill, Deng, Adenauer.
9. It's possible, but it's not typical. And there's no job like the Presidency, as four living ex-Presidents can tell us. The only other example we have of a President beginning a term in his 70s was Reagan in his second. It offers little encouragement.
10. Reagan defused concerns about his age during the 1984 campaign about as deftly as anyone ever has or ever will. But the concerns were well founded. Had the mid-'80s been a less benign period, the country and the world could have been in real trouble.
11. A Presidential nominee over 70 would mean, for the Democrats, passing up a major advantage in electoral politics. It is also a risk in terms of being sure the next President will be able to handle the burdens of the office, during what is likely to be a very difficult time.
12. Now, full disclosure: if I had to choose right now among all the Democratic candidates now in the race, my pick would be Warren. She seems to me, in brief, to be the smartest and have the clearest idea of how she wants to run the Executive Branch.
13. If I didn't think that I wouldn't go near a 70-year-old candidate; even thinking it, some discomfort accompanies my preference. It is passing strange to me that the logical successors to an historic, popular, and relatively successful Democratic President should all be....
14....people much older before they faced the voters than he was when he left office. This isn't how succession normally works. But those are the cards on the table; I'm just saying we ought to look at them honestly, and not deceive ourselves. [end]
