How old is too old to run for president?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m NOT asking “should there be an age limit”, but a more personal question: would you refuse to vote for a candidate based mainly on his age?

Watching the DEM DEBATES tonight with Mike Gravel, I thought he handled himself quite well on a couple of questions in particularly, but the man is 77 years old and rumored to be getting older. By the end of his first term he would be 82, well over the average life expectancy and far likelier to have mental and physical impairments than the vast majority of people 20 years younger. That bothers me (not that anybody, including Gravel, really thinks he has a serious shot anyway).

On the PUB end, McCain will be 76 in 2012 and the oldest 1st term president ever if elected. The 7 year difference twixt him and Gravel bothers me a lot less for some reason. OTOH, the fact Barack Obama was a teenager when STAR WARS was released doesn’t increase his appeal for me in the least.

I should add I know nothing about McCain or Gravel’s health. And that the big reasons I dislike McCain are political reasons that have nothing whatever to do with his age.

So personally, logically or ill-, it would seem that somewhere around 70 is the age that really starts to bother me for an incoming president. Are you bothered by a candidate’s age (young or old)?

2

PS- I admit the 7 year age difference twixt McCain and Gravel shouldn’t make much difference. Knowing nothing about their genes, it could well be that McCain stems from a family where members tend to die in their early 70s and that Gravel comes from a family where members routinely live to be centenarians. (OTOH both of my parents had close relatives who were active well into their 90s and my parents died of natural causes at 54 and 71 respectively due to different lifestyle.) Still, the 7 years twixt 70 and 77 are probably more significant than those twixt 35 and 42, and even 70 bothers me, just not as much.

3

I can’t find the link, but Larry King recently had a great interview with McCain’s mother…she is a very spry 99 year old and when she recently went to France, they wouldn’t rent her a car because she is too old. So, she simply bought a car, drove it around France with her sister, and then sold the car when they headed back home…the woman is a kick! Too bad her son has gone off the deep end of late, but that is another topic for another thread.

As far as how old is too old? Well, I think it was no big secret that Reagan was losing it a bit towards the end of his second term (early onset of Alzheimer’s?) and I think you should also take into consideration how quickly Presidents seem to age once they get elected. Seems like every person elected looks 20 years older after only eight years. For that reason, my own personal bias would have me be wary of anyone running for their first term if they were over 60…but that is just me and I guess it would also depend upon who they were running against.

4

It’s always been a joke that presidents pick stupid vice presidents as an assassination prevention. But maybe if candidates are going to start becoming rather elderly, it will place greater scrutiny on who will replace them in the event of death or incapacity.

For that matter, Ronald Reagan jokes aside, how would they decide whether a president was too senile to continue and had to be removed?

5

Cleveland, Wilson, and Eisenhower are three who come to mind that served when they were too disabled to govern (surgery, stroke, & heart attack respectively) and the public never had any idea how sick they were. In all cases the role of the VP was pretty much circumvented. I’ve a feeling a senile president would also be governed through his keepers so long as he wasn’t doing a real King George III in public appearances.
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6

I’d draw the line at 65, figuring that 70 is too old to be elected and someone elected at 66 would be 70 when running for re-election. Sure, the guy might be in great health but seeing how the presidency ages people (well, those that take it seriously, anyway), being elected while elderly doesn’t seem to be a great idea.

7

I’m a little wary of any one over 65 being elected, but it wouldn’t be a major factor in my voting. Anyone over 70 it could very well factor in. The simple fact of the matter is, every one ages differently.

My mother was born in 1932, so she’s 75 at the moment. She’s always been very politically active, she’s an active member of her local Democratic party and spent probably 30-40 hours volunteering when Kerry and Gore were running (while I disagree with her politics I have to admire her actually being active and doing things like this when a lot of her peers do not.) She’s pretty much the same woman who raised me intellectually.

Her mother is still alive. She’s 97 years old and she still drives to the supermarket and she is still pretty much the same woman I knew as my grandmother growing up. She doesn’t really have memory problems or “get confused.” She’s definitely an anomaly, as I’ve had a far greater number of experiences with people of extreme-age who are extremely senile than I have with ones who are wholly cognizant. My grandmother’s husband (my grandfather) lived to be 94, and up until the age of 90 I’d say he was one of the smartest men I ever knew.

Prior to his stroke he was extremely healthy, and in fact the cause of his stroke was an angiography, when he went in for the procedure the catheter that they insert into your femoral artery dislodged a piece of clotted blood from the artery wall which caused a stroke not long after. He was never really the same after that, what was most frustrating about his condition was his mental capacities were still fairly intact, but the stroke damaged his vocabulary. For example he loved cantaloupe, and one day he wanted my grandmother to buy him some when she went to the supermarket, he couldn’t get the word out. He could in a round about way tell you what it was he wanted, but the word itself was lost to him. It was incredibly frustrating for him and the rest of the family.

Also on my mother’s side, my grandmother’s parents lived to be extremely old. Her father died at 96 and her mother at 99. Her father was pretty much senile from the mid-80s on, but prior to that he was in pretty good shape mentally (he was born in 1876 and died in 1974, two years after I graduated High School.) Her mother (my great-grandmother) was pretty much active til the day she died in her sleep at age 99, incidentally she was quite possibly the meanest woman on earth during her 99 years and as a kid nothing brought as much dread to me as having to go to her house to visit. My great-grandmother was the oldest of 13 children, 11 of whom lived to be older than 90. Hilariously all of the brothers looked virtually identical in old age, as did all of the sisters. They even had the same hairstyles.

On my dad’s side of the family, it’s pretty much the opposite story. Dying young is common and those who make it past 65 or so seem to be senile fairly early on. My paternal grandmother lived to her 80s, but was in ill health for about twenty years and was very senile for many of those twenty.