Too Old to Be President?

Photos by David McNew/Getty Images; Mark Terrell/AP Photo; DJ Gunther/Corbis

The candidate rambled and was oddly off balance in some of his answers—so much so that media accounts after the first presidential debate in 1984 focused on whether Ronald Reagan’s performance against Walter Mondale was affected by his age. When the 73-year-old Reagan met the 56-year-old Mondale weeks later, Reagan was ready. Asked about age as a campaign issue, he replied: “I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”

Reagan’s retort effectively ended speculation about whether the president, who was seeking his second term, was too old to bear the responsibilities of the White House. He won reelection in a landslide.

As it is in many lines of work, age is a recurring issue for the American presidency. In fact, it has been since John F. Kennedy, 43, endured concerns about his youthful  inexperience in 1960—that is, until his performance in televised debates left an indelible image of quick-witted confidence, seeming to dominate a sweating, pallid Richard Nixon. (Ironically, health was potentially a bigger issue: Unknown to the public, JFK had serious medical conditions and used potent drugs to treat them.)

This fall, another age-and-experience versus youth-and-vigor matchup is in the offing when John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, faces off against either Hillary Clinton, who will turn 61 in October, or the even younger Barack Obama, who will be 47. Americans may be increasingly willing to judge people on ability rather than age, but perhaps not when it comes to filling the world’s toughest job.

McCain will turn 72 in August, and if elected, would be the oldest chief executive inaugurated to a first term. (Reagan was just shy of his 70th birthday when he first entered the White House.) Early indications are that the Arizona senator’s age already is an issue for many voters: About a third of voters surveyed by the independent Pew Research Center in February said that age 71 is “too old to be president.” That’s about the same proportion that judged 73-year-old Republican nominee Bob Dole too old in 1996.

In a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll taken in March, voters were significantly more likely to say that Americans are “ready to elect” an African American or a woman as president than a person over age 70. That’s important, says Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Center, because it shows that people worry about the competence of an older person. “They’re very frank about it,” he says.

But the flip side of the age issue is the experience issue, and if McCain had his way, that would be a dominant theme in a contest against Obama, McCain’s campaign aides say. Obama, a first-term U.S. senator from Illinois, was elected in 2004. His resumé includes eight years in the state Senate, several years as a civil rights lawyer and several more as a community organizer in Chicago.

McCain’s 25 years in Congress—first in the House and now in the Senate—and his career as a naval aviator, and the well-known story of his years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, make the two candidates’ biographies a study in contrasts.

“We intend to exploit Obama’s youth and inexperience,” says Frank Donatelli, deputy chairman of the Republican National Committee and a veteran of both Reagan campaigns. “On the youth issue, it’s not [McCain’s] age that’s a problem. I think it is [Obama’s] inexperience.”

Political spin? Sure. But in the opinion of some social scientists there is a solid basis for valuing an experienced mind.

Research on how older people make decisions shows that experience can compensate for declining cognitive skills, says psychologist Ellen Peters, senior research scientist with Decision Research, a nonprofit institute based in Eugene, Ore. It’s true that memory and speed in processing information begin to decline in one’s 20s, Peters says, which can hamper an older person’s decision making, especially in an unfamilar situation.

But experience, along with world knowledge that accumulates with age, “compensates for the loss of deliberative capacity,” she says.

Besides mental acuity, an older candidate’s health—or the possibility that a president will become ill in office—can present concerns. McCain will soon cross the 75-year threshold often used to separate “young-old” age from  “old-old.” And the candidate underwent surgery for skin cancer in 2000, though medical experts say his prospects appear favorable.

But the health issue is “really more a matter of function,” says Robert Butler, M.D., founder of the International Longevity Center-U.S.A. “In the instance of McCain, he’s had a heck of a campaign. He had an amazing amount of energy and capability as far as I could see.”

McCain’s aides, too, cite his grueling campaign schedule as evidence of his fitness. The key to defusing concerns about a candidate’s age, says Donatelli of the RNC, is simply having the campaigner demonstrate through a vigorous public schedule and other activities that he is up to the job. Remember all those television images of Reagan riding horses and chopping wood at his California ranch?

McCain, like Reagan, also deploys wit as a weapon. He refers to himself as “older than dirt” and bearing “more scars than Frankenstein.” He points to the longevity of his 96-year-old mother, Roberta, as a sign of good genes.

Nonetheless, the dynamics of a campaign with “change” as a preeminent theme, and in which Obama in particular has mobilized an enormous following of excited young voters, inevitably keep the age issue alive. So do the media: When McCain recently confused Iranian involvement with dueling factions in Iraq, even Brit Hume of Fox News, a network often sympathetic to conservatives, suggested that McCain had had a “senior moment.” And the media had a field day when Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa.—75 years old himself—said flat-out while campaigning for Clinton that McCain is the wrong choice because the presidency is “no old man’s job.”

Should the Democrats ultimately choose the New York senator as their nominee, both the Clinton and McCain camps agree, ideological differences would likely outweigh age and experience issues. But maybe not. With Clinton as the Democratic nominee come November, the nation would still face the choice between 61-year-old and 72-year-old candidates.

But a potential Obama-McCain race would open a yawning generation gap, polls show. When Gallup analyzed data gleaned from interviews with more than 21,000 voters, it found the two roughly even overall in a head-to-head contest. Obama would have a 20-point advantage over McCain among voters who are 18 to 29. McCain would hold a 51-35 percent edge among voters who are 65 or older. When the Pew poll analyzed defections that would occur among Democrats in a McCain-Obama race, it found that 14 percent of Democrats ages 50 to 64 would vote for the Republican—a proportion that grew to 22 percent among those over 65.

Perhaps they see the candidate as an individual, not in terms of age. As McCain joked about Murtha after the Pennsylvania congressman raised the age issue: “Speak for yourself, Jack.”

Marie Cocco is a syndicated columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group.