During my hours of extensive research on Wikipedia, I learned the average age of retirement is between 65 and 70 years old. Somebody should advise John McCain that nobody would think less of him for retiring at the age of 71. If McCain won he would be 72 years old when taking the highest office in the land, and you can do the math of how old he would be at the end of his hypothetical second term.
You can call it ageism if you want, but age has to be a factor when making a decision as important as voting for the president of the United States. People losing endurance and judgment in their golden years isn’t some myth or stereotype; it’s an unfortunate fact of life.
McCain has been fairly fortunate that the only time this topic comes up is when it’s part of some comedic banter. It might make people uncomfortable to talk about it, but it would be irresponsible to avoid it. Republican strategist Ed Rollins said that Democrats speak about McCain’s age in code. Rep. Jack Murtha didn’t mix words when he said that age should be accounted for because the older you get the less energy you have to confront difficult situations. At 76 years of age himself, Murtha should know.
In an article for Science Daily, psychology professor Ellen Peters states that the elderly brain is slower to process unfamiliar information and is more apt to rely on emotional response. The article states that there are plenty of scenarios where an emotional response could be the best response, but it also says that decision making based purely on emotions is the reason elderly people are targeted by scam artists.
The simple fact is, as Peters puts it, “Thinking capacity declines with time. We learn less easily and process information more slowly.” So if the topic of McCain’s age is off the table, then at what age should a person no longer be considered eligible to be the leader of the free world? Should the presidency be within reach for a person over the age of 85 or 90? Should we elect a leader with questionable mental capacity to make some of the most complex decisions in the modern world? Just to highlight where McCain is in the modern world, he admitted he doesn’t use a computer and that his wife has to use it for him.
While McCain is not so old that he’s likely to mistake the gas pedal for the brake and plow into a crowd of pedestrians, he has still shown examples of mental slips that are indicative of his age. While speaking in Jordan recently, he kept trying to make the case against Iran, and kept referring to their support for al-Qaeda when Iran is predominantly Shiite and al-Qaeda is mostly Sunni. That could be written off as a general mistake if it weren’t for that fact that it was a prepared speech and he did it several times.
As the campaign goes on, we’ll see McCain attempt to use the Reagan defense of pointing out Obama’s “youth and inexperience.” That just about says it all. If you’re referring to a 46-year-old man as being youthful, then you’ve just admitted that you’ve abandoned your mental and physical prime somewhere between bellbottoms and new wave music.
