Are some people too old to run for president?

A few weeks ago, Robert G. Kaiser, a former managing editor of The Washington Post, broached this quasi-taboo question. He is 76. He asks:

Can politicians our age be effective presidents?

Good journalist that he is, he queried academics who study old people. A couple of comments:

• “If talking about someone’s age is taboo and we are immediately accused of ageism, then that shuts down the discourse,” argues Jennifer Sasser, 52, a gerontologist at Oregon State University. A 70-year-old candidate “will have 20 more years of lived experience than a 50-year-old, and that translates not only into potential expertise but also a richer mind,” Sasser says. But “you can’t stay at the height of your capacity forever. That’s not the trajectory. We do become less energetic. Our bodies and minds do change.”

• “Age per se should not disqualify a candidate,” says Denise C. Park, 67, a psychologist who founded the Center for Vital Longevity at the University of Texas at Dallas. “Older brains are packed with knowledge and experiences that may constitute ‘wisdom’ and would help a president perform well in office,” she said, but she added that age obviously brings certain costs, “specifically in their capacity for quick processing of new information, remembering details, and the ability to process and use new information.” ... “All brains show some degradation over time, but the fact that older people have degraded brains does not necessarily mean [they have] less useful mental skills,” she observed. “The additional knowledge and experience that comes with age may compensate for this.”

My friend Ronni Bennett whose blog on aging is essential reading for anyone who cares about old people or is one, threw the issue open to her very smart, very generous, comment section. Two sage responses:

• During the last presidential campaign, I kept asking how Trump and Clinton could keep up the pace of campaigning at their ages. My husband answered, "They have staff."

• Some people maintain a high level of mental functioning into their 80s and 90s. {May I be so fortunate!} Nobody maintains a high level of physical function so late in life.

I come to the question from the experience last fall of working on an election while 71. This was not running for office, but facilitating one tiny cog in the complex human machine that is a successful campaign. Nothing short of going to war or possibly professional athletic competition requires more concentrated focus and aggressive implementation than executing a campaign well.

I've spent decades doing this work at various levels of campaign hierarchy and I knew what was needed from me. I was happy to discover that I could still do it. I didn't lose details, could switch gears on a dime when needed, and retained the ability to see bottlenecks coming and evade them. I trust that those with whom I worked found me a useful addition to the project.

And after we won, I was drained. That's normal. But recovery from a campaign used to take me a four to six weeks. This time it took months; I may not be quite recovered yet.

A person over age 70 who ran for president would indeed have staff. But nonetheless, the U.S. president performs one of the most intense, multi-faceted, political jobs in world while surrounded by a cacophony of demanding friends and a mob of hostile detractors. I question whether any of us who have reached a certain age could sustain our performance at peak level under these demands. (The current incumbent seems to be dealing with the impossible job by doing as little as possible except ignorant tweeting and incitement of hatred.)

A younger person may not have the accumulated wisdom we hope we gain as we age. But that younger person will also be a native to the culture and context in which we now live. For those of us over 70, the native culture of our youth was family memories of our parents' experience of the Great Depression and European fascism, followed by the Cold War, fear of the Bomb, the immoral war on Vietnam, and the vast social upheavals resulting from Black, brown, and many women's freedom struggles. All that is ancient history now, even for the youngest Boomers like Barack Obama.

As the abolitionist James Russell Lowell wrote in a previous era of change: "new occasions teach new duties." It's peak season for people who came up after Reagan and the GOPers freed predatory capitalism from social welfare constraints, after the end of the Cold War, after 9/11, after Abu Ghraib, after the 2008 Great Recession, after the world was enlarged and infected by digital media, after going to college meant taking on debt for decades, after the country was primed to be conned by a greedy, immoral TV cartoon character.

I want a president who is native to this time, to now. And that come close to cutting out the Democratic aspirants who are over 70, even if I feel aligned with them. Of course I'll work to elect whoever emerges from the nomination process, but sadly, too many of these candidates look to me too old for the job.