Age Becomes the New Race and Gender
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
WASHINGTON — This year’s campaign for president has provided an extended test of attitudes toward race and gender, two powerful and volatile forces in politics. Now a third is about to join that list: age.
If elected, Senator John McCain of Arizona would take office in January at the age of 72. No one has begun a first term in the White House that old. By contrast, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois would be 47, young indeed, though still four years older than John F. Kennedy was when he was inaugurated as the nation’s youngest elected president in 1961 (and one year older than Bill Clinton was when he was sworn in).
If race and gender are combustible issues that speak to hidden prejudices and ugly currents in this nation’s history — “I know there are still barriers and biases out there, often unconscious,” Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton said in her concession speech last Saturday — age arguably leads to more-complicated questions.
This is, in part, because the very notion of “old age” is continually in flux, owing to increased life expectancy and advances in medicine; but it is also because questions about age can be unsettling to anyone on the wrong side of the divide. Race and gender are, in most cases, inescapable categories. But who among us really thinks of himself or herself as old, with all it connotes: memory lapses, slowed reflexes, and — wait, how did this sentence start again?
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My mother, aunt and uncle - McCain's peers
believe he's too old. They wouldn't vote Republican, but unlike Shrub, who brings up words of contempt and disgust, they all actually LIKE McCain. Just like they liked Bob Dole. Hated Reagan, Bush 41 and Shrub. They don't mind McCain personally, but they all insist he's too old. I think it's the military thing with all of them.