…and gets the answer back, It depends. Is my party going to run somebody old?
Before the 2008 presidential campaign, for example, Democrats were much more likely to raise concerns about electing an older presidential candidate. A February 2007 Pew poll showed, for instance, that 60 percent of Democrats said they would be less likely to support presidential candidates in their 70s — far more than Republicans (42 percent) and independents (43 percent).
…Democrats are now starting to feel more positively toward older candidates: The new Pew poll found that only 44 percent said they would be less likely to support a presidential candidate who is 70 or above, a decrease of 16 percentage points from the 2007 poll — a drop that Pew called “particularly notable” relative to the smaller decreases observed among Republicans (from 42 percent to 32 percent) and independents (from 43 percent to 34 percent).
And let’s be honest about it: the GOP is going to find its relative support for old candidates dropping like a stone as soon as it becomes clear that we’re going to be nominating somebody who will be about twenty to thirty years younger than either likely Democratic nominee. John McCain’s age was just one more thing that I had to tolerate in 2008, and it wasn’t the most obnoxious thing about him. It wasn’t even in the top ten. Does that mean that I won’t hammer Hillary Clinton and/or Joe Biden for being old, and probably prone to neurological incidents?
…Of course I’m going to still do that. Age is a legitimate concern*. Sure, we got away with it with Ronald Reagan – but a Reagan doesn’t come along every day, more’s the pity.
Moe Lane
*This is the part where the Left starts to fume and/or snark, largely because it demonstrates the sometimes ruthless pragmatism of the Right. One of the major advantages of not having a specific ideology – unlike, say, either liberals or libertarians – is that you can decide things on a case-by-case basis and not worry too much about precedents being set accordingly. This drives ideologues nuts, because their political positions are based on their particular unified theories of life, and not on how things actually work. This unfairness (for given values of ‘fairness’) might bother conservatives, except that… it doesn’t, sorry.