Is John McCain too senile to be president? The quotes used by the AP’s Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar to contextualize a new AP-Yahoo News poll, in which 38 percent of voters said the Arizona senator is “too old,” certainly suggest that this is the question on voters’ minds.
American University communications professor Leonard Steinhorn articulates the supposed worry of Americans who “wonder whether [McCain]’s going to have the vigor and the health as president.” Schenectady Republican Virginia Bailey represents a “real person” with this concern. “Sure, people live to be 90, but you are not as sharp,” she says.
Alonzo-Zaldivar trots out geriatricians to play the other side. Dr. William Thomas, at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s Erickson School of Aging Studies, remarks: “The presidential campaign is full of chatter—much of quite misinformed—about the role of age…. People in old age are fully capable of imaginative and skillful work.” Dr. David Reuben, chief of geriatrics at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, offers this support: “As a clinician, I look at whether [septuagenarians] appear to be robust, whether their sentences flow, whether their thoughts connect, whether they are easily distractible…. McCain appears to be quite robust.”
McCain is obviously “robust,” though others have taken his gift for gaffes as evidence to the contrary. Referring to McCain’s infamous “Bomb Bomb Iran” parody of the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann” this morning on MSNBC, Contessa Brewer remarked: “But there’s this medical research that says as people age, they lose the ability to filter what they say.” Comedian Andy Borowitz amplified this by suggesting: “If we have John McCain as president, it would sort of be like having Estelle Getty from the “Golden Girls” in the White House.” A debate has broken out in the opinion columns of the Concord Monitor, in which McCain supporter Steve Duprey documented McCain’s rigorous schedule and suggested that his age becomes less of a factor if voters only worry about his first term, which will end as McCain turns seventy-six.
This chatter about McCain’s vitality distracts from the real—and legitimate—question about his age: Has he grown out of touch with the lives of the American people as he has aged? Take the technology section of McCain’s interview with Adam Nagourney and Michael Cooper in this Sunday’s New York Times:
He said, ruefully, that he had not mastered how to use the Internet and relied on his wife and aides like Mark Salter, a senior adviser, and Brooke Buchanan, his press secretary, to get him online to read newspapers (though he prefers reading those the old-fashioned way) and political Web sites and blogs.
“They go on for me,” he said. “I am learning to get online myself, and I will have that down fairly soon, getting on myself. I don’t expect to be a great communicator, I don’t expect to set up my own blog, but I am becoming computer literate to the point where I can get the information that I need.”
Asked which blogs he read, he said: “Brooke and Mark show me Drudge, obviously. Everybody watches, for better or for worse, Drudge. Sometimes I look at Politico. Sometimes RealPolitics.”
At that point, Mrs. McCain, who had been intensely engaged with her BlackBerry, looked up and chastised her husband. “Meghan’s blog!” she said, reminding him of their daughter’s blog on his campaign Web site. “Meghan’s blog,” he said sheepishly.
As he answered questions, sipping a cup of coffee with his tie tight around his neck, his aides stared down at their BlackBerries.
As they tapped, Mr. McCain said he did not use a BlackBerry, though he regularly reads messages on those of his aides. “I don’t e-mail, I’ve never felt the particular need to e-mail,” Mr. McCain said.
These Blackberry-surfing aides are probably thanking the technology gods that their candidate didn’t describe the internet as a “series of tubes.”
Nagourney and Cooper were obviously playing this episode for its humor. But Americans—especially older Americans still in the work force, who may have lost blue collar jobs and been retrained to use computers in order to feed their families—might be justifiably resentful of a man who can rely on staff to avoid the challenges they have been forced to overcome. That seems to be the real story behind the questions surrounding McCain’s age. So why the persistent senility frame?
It’s the wrong angle to take. Doctors can alleviate any concerns about McCain’s health. But Americans can rightly wonder whether he truly understands the faltering economy that he will have to steer back to health if he becomes president. When voters tell pollsters they think McCain is “too old,” they may mean they think he’s out of touch with today’s reality. But we’ll never know if the media spends its time perpetuating a silly debate about which Golden Girl he most resembles.
Lester Feder is a freelance reporter based in Washington, D.C., and a research scientist at George Washington University School of Public Health.