The Age Thing

Ed Kilgore takes a gander at poll results indicating that people are excited about the idea of electing a 72 year-old man to the presidency and observes that "this kind of polling may soon make McCain's age and health the issue a lot of observers have expected it to become for a long time." Actually, though, I doubt that it will. Will the media raise this issue? Probably not, since it clearly cuts against John McCain and in the eyes of the press John McCain can do no wrong. Will McCain's political adversaries raise the issue? Maybe, but it'll be hard for it to have a big effect, since in the eyes of the press John McCain can do no wrong and launching this sort of attack on him will prompt a backlash and be viewed as underhanded. Meanwhile, I looked up some mortality statistics courtesy of the CDC. It seems that a white man has a cumulative 15 percent chance of dying between the ages of 72 and 76 (see page seventeen for the data). In case of re-election, a white man faces an additional 22 percent chance of dying between his 76th birthday and his 80th. Now of course to look at this more closely you'd have to consider McCain's history of skin cancer and so forth. In addition, as President he'd be subjected to the well-known horrors of socialized medicine.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2008/01/the-age-thing/47921/