McCain is echt oud ...

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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?

It is hardly any wonder that Mr. McCain seemed rankled last week when some of Mr. Obama’s supporters said he seemed “confused”; Mr. McCain did not disabuse a reporter who asked if he thought the Obama surrogates were using code words. (Mr. Obama himself in May said that Mr. McCain was “losing his bearings.”)

Age will figure in this election — not only because of the gulf in years separating the two candidates, but also because of fault lines of age within the electorate. Both Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama will have to reckon with the great mass of baby boomers, the post-World War II generation who make up a major part of the voting demographic and are themselves experiencing for themselves just what it means to get older. (The oldest of the boomers, born in 1946, reach the early retirement age of 62 this year.)

Many boomers, as we all know, cherish and chase youth, and many of them, not surprisingly, could be found at Mr. Obama’s rallies this fall, the political equivalent of a 50-year-old man wearing a baseball cap backward. Yet, at a time when many Americans live into their 80s and beyond, those who are beginning to contemplate their first Social Security check can simultaneously embrace the belief that they will remain active members of society for years, even decades, to come. For these voters, Mr. McCain may seem as much a barrier-breaker as either Mr. Obama or Mrs. Clinton.

And there’s a further complication: While there is a distinction between age and belonging to a generation, the two are closely linked in this election. Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama are the faces of two very different generations, bookends of the baby boom. Mr. McCain, born in 1936, belongs to the tail end of the pre-boom period, unsettled and confused by the culture war of the 1960s (much of which played out when he was a prisoner of war). Mr. Obama is, at least in spirit, a post-boomer who has made a point of saying it’s time to move beyond the social and political clashes that defined that period (including, not incidentally, conflicts over race and gender).

“Age isn’t measured in purely chronological terms, I suspect,” said Richard Norton Smith, a historian and a scholar-in-residence at George Mason University — and a former speechwriter for Bob Dole, who was 73 when he won the Republican nomination in 1996. “For example, I don’t think it was his physical age that doomed Bob Dole, so much as the perception that he belonged, for worse and better, to an earlier generation.”

Dwelling on age carries the obvious risk of a backlash, which explains why other issues become useful proxies as campaigns try to talk about that which should not be talked about.

When Mr. McCain or his advisers refer to Mr. Obama as unformed, or inexperienced, or unsophisticated in the ways of the world, the underlying message is that Mr. Obama is too young to be president. And when Mr. Obama or his supporters stress the need for change and a break from the status quo, or — don’t underestimate this — emphasize how critical the selection of a vice president is this year, the subtext, to some extent, is McCain’s advanced years.

“What I’ve heard Obama do is basically say, ‘I’m the change, he’s not,’ ” said Bill Lacy, the director of the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas. “I think that’s the more skillful way to draw the line. The more he tries to make McCain’s age a liability, the more people who are older are going to be a little bit turned off by it.”

Indeed, at first glance Mr. McCain’s age appears to give him an opportunity in the election. Mr. Obama struggled with older voters in the primaries. Combined exit polls from all the primaries plus the Iowa and Nevada caucuses found that Mrs. Clinton won 59 percent of voters age 65 and older, compared with 34 percent for Mr. Obama.

And the landscape has changed since Ronald Reagan was inaugurated at the age of 69 in 1981, setting the record that Mr. McCain is now trying to break. Consider average life expectancy. It reached 78 in 1996, up from 72 in 1975, according to a report by the National Center for Health Statistics released last week.

But there’s a curious twist. Advisers to Mr. Dole — who is now 84 and has served, not incidentally, as a pitchman for Viagra — said one of the lessons of the 1996 campaign was that Mr. Dole’s toughest audiences were those in his age bracket. In polling and interviews, these voters often pointed to their own daily experiences — for instance, the struggle to balance a checkbook — when they explained why they would be reluctant to support him.

“Older voters really know what the measure of their infirmities are, even if they are well,” said Herbert L. Abrams, a professor of radiology at Stanford University who has written extensively on aging and presidential leadership (and who is 88). “I’m still playing tennis and all that. But my capacity to write with the kind of ease and fluidity that I once had, it has changed, it really has.”

These are common experiences for an older person, Dr. Abrams noted: “He knows that his capacity to process information has changed, he can’t do it as rapidly. His concentration may not be as good.”

Mr. McCain, as many Republicans acknowledge, looks his age, with his shock of bright-white hair, a face scarred by skin cancer and a stiff posture that is a reminder of the torture he suffered in a Hanoi prison. When he is outside in the sun, he wears sunglasses and a hat — an admirable bit of self-protection that nonetheless can have the effect of making Mr. McCain look as if he were lounging in a retirement village in Arizona. And when McCain reaches for a pop culture reference, it is for the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann.” Mr. Obama drops casual references to Jay-Z.

All this is to say that in a culture fixated on youth, Mr. McCain is vulnerable to a double-standard that shadows him whenever he is in public view. Unlike Mr. Obama, if Mr. McCain stumbles on the stairs or over a few facts, it has the potential to become the kind of moment that crystallizes concerns about his fitness.

Consider the reaction when Mr. Dole tumbled off a stage and ended up flat on his back during his presidential bid. It could have happened just as easily to a candidate half Mr. Dole’s age; the reason for the fall was that a staff member had failed to nail down a guard rail. But the incident resulted in a photograph of Mr. Dole, looking rattled and frail, that his aides said was devastating to his public image.

Mr. McCain, for his part, has been meeting the issue head on. He has not disputed the notion that his age is a legitimate concern for some voters, and his campaign has moved decisively to deal with it. The candidate maintains a frantic campaign schedule that his aides point to as evidence that he is one very vigorous senior citizen. And like President Reagan before him, Mr. McCain has met the age question with humor. “If you missed my skit on ‘Saturday Night Live,’ ” he said at a town-hall meeting on Wall Street Thursday night, “I said the primary qualification to be president of the United States is to be very, very, very, very old.”

He also reminds audiences, time and again, that his mother, Roberta, is 96 years old and still operating at full speed. Mr. McCain is less likely to mention that his father died at 70, two months after Reagan was sworn into office.

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Op vrijdag 20 juni 2008 11:10 schreef eriksd het volgende:
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