Why We Don't Want an Old Guy

Paris Hilton's ad brought this to mind. There has been this stigma against bringing up McCain's age in this campaign, as if the issue was the same as racism, or sexism. It's not. Someone who's white can do just as good of a job at being President as someone who's black. A man can be just as good at leading the nation as a woman. The same does not apply for someone who's elderly.

Potentially, they can be just as good. But let us consider the last rather youth-challenged President that we had. Many people loved Reagan. (This is a liberal blog. Do not be surprised that I was not one of them.) But Reagan had a regular ploy with the press. He would pretend not to remember things. Not to remember nearly everything. That allowed him to get away with the Iran-Contra affair, where, in the early Clinton years, we learned that the Reagan-Bush administration was actually culpable.

Now, it is possible that he actually didn't remember. For tragically, as we all know, Reagan was afflicted with Alzheimer's Disease shortly after he left office. Looking back, most experts feel that it was actually setting in in the final years of Reagan's second administration. Perhaps it was some sort of judgment of God, where if you lie enough about forgetting, God allows you to be in the state of forgetting; perhaps in truth he wasn't forgetting, but was afflicted by a disease.

This is not to say, of course, that McCain will lie to us, or will get Alzheimer's Disease, or simply forget a lot. But it is to say what doctors and scientist's well know- with age, the chances of getting a debilitating illness dramatically increase, and the older you are, the more those odds increase. And with extreme age, the odds of getting Alzheimer's are much higher than with someone who is younger. Unfortunately, as with Reagan, we will not necessarily know that the disease has set in, and there is no constitutional provision for removing someone from office with the beginnings of dementia. And already, we see signs of McCain stumbling over his words. Maybe he's just a bad speaker. Maybe not. Do we want to risk it?

McCain. He's old. Is he worth the risk?