Dropping The A-Word
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

We all want our leaders to be statesmanlike, but to be an “elder statesman” is political death. It is a strange paradox of western societies that, as the average age of voters increases year by year, we seem to expect those we elect to be, or at least to pretend to be, ever younger.
In other fields, age and experience are properly valued. Take literature: Doris Lessing has just won the Nobel Prize aged 88, while the two other living British literature laureates, V.S. Naipaul and Harold Pinter, are 76 and 78 respectively. Or take economics: Leonid Hurwicz, who led the American team that has just won the Nobel Prize, is 90. Or consider the esteem accorded to octogenarian former chairmen of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan and Paul Volcker.
Politics is another matter. This week witnessed a particularly dramatic case in Britain. The Liberal Democrats, Britain’s third party, had their best ever result in the 2005 election under the convivial Charlie Kennedy, but he was rapidly deposed after it emerged that he had been concealing a serious drink problem. Other candidates dropped out due to sex scandals. Desperate for respectability, the party then elected Sir Menzies (“Ming”) Campbell, its eminent expert on foreign affairs.
The trouble was that Sir Ming, as he became known, was in his mid-sixties and looks even older. Questions about his age and lack of dynamism never went away, especially after the Conservatives chose David Cameron, a generation younger, as their leader. The muttering rose to a crescendo in recent weeks after polls showed the Tories making gains at Liberal expense. The only thing that was keeping Sir Ming in place was the fear of a snap election. Once Prime Minister Gordon Brown flunked it, there was time for the Liberal Democrats to elect a new leader.
And so, last Monday, Sir Ming was unhorsed. His resignation was announced by two shifty-looking colleagues, while the gallant knight himself hid away in his elegant Edinburgh townhouse. Glimpsed at the window, Sir Ming’s face was a picture of misery.
It is bad enough to have to admit to the world that you are in the job merely because your sobriety contrasts favorably with your predecessor’s alcoholism. It is worse to be dumped because your colleagues have been going around saying: “I’d rather have Charlie drunk than Ming sober.” Instead of a good ol’ boy drinking whiskey and rye, he was a poor old boy drowning his sorrows in mineral water.
Could this episode have happened quite like this in America? Ronald Reagan was 69 when he was first elected President. Many senators are, as the title implies, senior citizens. The “gray vote” is better organized. Ageism is unacceptable.
And yet…I still wonder whether the troubles of Senator John McCain’s candidacy have less to do with his support for the surge in Iraq than with the fact that he not only is old, but looks old. (Reagan didn’t.) Out on the campaign trail, the senator regularly has to field questions about Alzheimers and other infirmities of old age. There is no comparison between Mr. McCain’s record and, say, that of Barack Obama. But the A-word is inescapable.
In Australia, the same problem is afflicting an even more formidable politician: John Howard, Prime Minister since 1996 and many think the best Australia has ever had. At 68, he is younger than Reagan, Churchill or Adenauer when they first took over, but he is struggling to persuade Australians to give him a fifth term when the election is held next month.
There are few major differences on policy between Mr. Howard and his Labor opponent, Kevin Rudd; there is, though, an age gap of 18 years. True, Mr. Howard faced an even younger opponent (Mark Latham) in 2004, but won handsomely. This time, however, Mr. Howard has promised to retire within a couple of years even if, against the odds, he is re-elected yet again.
In general, democracies do not tend towards gerontocracy, though there are exceptions. Until the meteoric rise of Nicolas Sarkozy, France had been dominated by the same cast of characters since the 1970s: Giscard d’Estaing, Francois Mitterrand, Jacques Chirac, Jean-Marie Le Pen. But if France is not much of an advertisement for elder statesmen, Israel undoubtedly is.
Until Ariel Sharon was struck down by a stroke last year, Israeli politics had been dominated by the same battle-hardened generation of men and women who helped David Ben Gurion to found the Jewish state in 1948, including Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, Yitzhak Rabin, Menachem Begin, and Yitzhak Shamir. One of them, Shimon Peres, is still the (non-executive) president at the age of 84. No other country has boasted such a generation of giants. Who can blame Israelis for their loyalty?
The truth is that age is no guide to political virtue — or vice. China is as sinister under Hu Jintao (a mere 65) as it was under Mao or Deng Xiaoping; Russia as hostile under Putin as under Brezhnev; North Korea as unpredictable under Kim Jong-Il as under Kim Il-Sung; Iran as dangerous under Ahmadinejad as under Khomeini.
Old age can occasionally be turned to advantage. Lord Palmerston, among the most popular of British prime ministers, was over 80 when he died in office in 1865. His Tory opponents once plotted to expose his latest affair. Benjamin Disraeli — himself quite a ladies’ man — warned them: “Palmerston is now seventy. If he could prove evidence of his potency in his electoral address, he’d sweep the country.”
I fear that Senator Clinton, like Queen Victoria, would not be amused — but Disraeli was right.