How Old Is Too Old?

Guest Opinion

By Isiah Smith, Jr. | Feb. 17, 2024

The United States and its professional politicians are aging. Joe Biden, 81, and Donald Trump, 77, are the oldest candidates to ever run for re-election as president. The median ages of U.S. senators and representatives are among the oldest on record, and some leaders are facing health questions.

To run for the House, one must be at least 25 years of age, 30 for the Senate, and 35 to seek the presidency. Is it also wise to set age maximums? For the presidency, it is unfortunately too late. But it’s not too late to start thinking about it.

There are arguments on both sides of the age question. Politicians in high office need to be capable and robust; presumably, they also benefit from wisdom and experience. Voters decide a candidate’s suitability, and legal requirements govern everyone’s eligibility.

The question of when it is too old to be president of this fragile United States has been much in the news lately. The question goes beyond the president; our political leaders tend to age in place, impacting the quality of the laws passed.

The U.S. has become a gerontocracy, an oligarchical rule by leaders significantly older than most adults. The numbers tell the story: approximately 83 percent of the U.S. population is under 65, and 17 percent is 65 and older. In 2023, the median age of U.S. Senators was 65.3. The median age of House Members was 57.9. A gerontocracy indeed.

Lately, the greatest failure has been the apparent inability to get any meaningful law-making done. Lawmakers, the current crop of lawbreakers, appear meretricious, mendacious, and incompetent.

“The 118th Congress, marked so far by utter chaos in the GOP-controlled House, passed only 20 bills signed into law by President Joe Biden, according to data from data analytics company Quorum and reported by Axios,” writes Sharon Zhang of Truthout. “By contrast, the analysis finds other historically unproductive sessions when Republicans controlled one or both chambers under Democratic Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama passed between 70 and 73 laws in their first year.”

HuffPost has reported the 118th Congress is on track to be the least productive since the Great Depression.

Is that all due to age? No. Partisanship, infighting, the need to replace the Speaker of the House, and other issues all played some part in that low number. In fact, it is the younger of the two chambers, the House, where the performance is abysmal. The Senate appears more thoughtful, better house-trained, and less unruly. But compared to what?

Science has much to say about age and fitness for office. A Pew Research Center analysis reveals that of the 187 countries for which data are available, only eight had leaders older than President Biden. The oldest is Cameroon’s Paul Biya, 90.

“The trend since 1950 has been for the heads of government to get younger,” The Economist reported in a January 2024 piece. “The average age upon taking up the top job has fallen from 60.2 to 55.5 in the past half-century.”

And there’s no denying that a stressful job like being president of the United States takes its toll. In 2015, Harvard Medical School and Case Western University Medical School researchers found that election winners lived 4.4 fewer years than runners-up who never held office. (Hillary Clinton may yet have the last laugh.)

The science of aging isn’t old. When discussing aging, we project mortality and possible decrepitude. As presidents do, aging on the national stage draws attention to the increasing signs of deteriorating conditions; no human being is impervious to the ravages of the aging process.

In Leviathan (1660), Thomas Hobbes expressed his views that man’s life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” And so, it is. Both men currently running for president have sometimes demonstrated decreased mobility and verbal tics that seem to have grown over time.

Jay Olshansky, a University of Chicago gerontologist, opined that the scrutiny about the candidates’ age-related issues is “sampling errors resulting from relentless scrutiny. For example, much ridicule followed an incident where President Biden fell off his bike. Biden’s foot got caught in a pedal strap rather than losing balance. This might happen to anyone; as Mark Twain wrote, ‘Get a bicycle; you will not regret it if you live.’”

More pertinent was that a 79-year-old man was cycling in the first place. One could not imagine the former president ever riding a bicycle.

During a May 27, 2017, Group of Seven meeting, “the six other world leaders—from Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan—walked 700 yards to take a group photo at a piazza in a hilltop town. The U.S. leader decided to wait until he could get a golf cart,” wrote Julia Manchester for The Hill.

Which proves age is more than a number.

Isiah Smith, Jr. is a retired government attorney.