Is McCain too old for the presidency?

Senator John McCain certainly is not too old for the presidency.  However, he will this week -- and for the rest of the campaign -- be dogged by questions about his age.

McCain was born on August 29, 1936, so he would be 72 years old on Inauguration Day in January 2009.  For a United States senator, this is not a particularly august span of years: the oldest and longest-serving sitting senator, Robert Byrd, is 89, and former Senator Strom Thurmond retired when he was 100.

Yet US voters tend to prefer younger presidential candidates, and have rarely elected individuals who have passed their mid-60s.  In a February 2007 Gallup poll 42% of respondents said that they would not vote for a presidential contender over 72 years of age -- a figure that greatly exceeded the percentage who would refuse to back a woman (11%) or a black man (5%).  Only potential homosexual candidates (43%) and atheists (53%) were rejected by al larger share of respondents.

Ronald Reagan is the one glaring exception to this ageist bias.  He entered office in 1981 just two weeks shy of his 70th birthday, and left the presidency in 1989 at 78 -- the oldest US chief executive in history.

Reagan’s age was a political issue in the 1980 battle for the Republican nomination, the subsequent general election, and his 1984 re-election campaign.  However, he was able to parry pointed media questions on the subject, joking during one debate that he would not make an issue of his opponent’s relative “youth and inexperience”.

However, Reagan’s main device for defusing the issue was the selection of a younger, experienced, highly competent politician as his vice-president: George Bush.  The elder Bush was someone that most voters could easily envisage as president in his own right, in the event that Reagan died in office.  They key for McCain will be to select someone similar -- a younger individual that voters regard as a plausible president, without outshining the man at the top of the Republican ticket.