Can You Be Too Old to Run for President
Are Biden and Sanders Too Old to Be President?
Jimmy Carter seems to retrieve at that place should exist an age limit for the highest role.
Mr. Bokat-Lindell is a writer in The New York Times Opinion section.
Paradigm 
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Life has 7 stages, Shakespeare wrote, ending in oblivion, but he might accept forgotten an eighth: running for president. Jimmy Carter, the country's longest-living former chief executive, seemed to express concern on Tuesday that all 3 Autonomous presidential front-runners are septuagenarians. "I hope there's an age limit," he said. "If I were only 80 years old, if I was 15 years younger, I don't believe I could undertake the duties I experienced when I was president."
The debate: The age minimum for the presidency is 35. Should there be a maximum, besides?
WHAT YOU Need TO KNOW
The boilerplate age of American presidents at swearing-in is 55, but recent decades have seen many outliers. At lxx, President Trump was the oldest to take office, beating a record prepare by Ronald Reagan, who still remains the oldest person ever to leave it, at 77. Well before the finish of Mr. Reagan'due south 2d term, in 1989, speculation abounded about his mental refuse; he would be found to have Alzheimer's affliction five years later.
Today, 76-year-old Joe Biden is leading the polls for the Democratic nomination, followed by Senators Bernie Sanders, 78, and Elizabeth Warren, 70. Both Mr. Sanders and Mr. Biden would be older going in than Mr. Reagan was coming out, and Mr. Biden, in particular, has established something of a pattern of blunders that has invited questions nigh his mental fitness to hold the most powerful part on the planet. And given that the average life expectancy for white males was 76.4 years in 2017, concern about physical longevity has also reared its caput.
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WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING
Yep, there should be an historic period limit
For Mr. Carter, putting an age cap on the presidency is a thing of guarding against the cognitive decline that naturally attends old age. "You lot accept to be very flexible with your heed," he said, calculation:
You have to exist able to get from one bailiwick to some other and concentrate on each 1 fairly and then put them all together in a comprehensive way. … The things I faced simply in foreign affairs, I don't think I could undertake them if I was 80 years old.
Caitlin Schneider has expressed a similar view in the progressive outlet Splinter, floating a maximum age of 65. She writes:
Some might argue that the sheer premise of this story is ageist, only existence president is (theoretically) an incredibly taxing job! To question whether we ought to have an age cap on candidates isn't designed to disparage the old, merely to take a long hard wait at the job at mitt. If the rules say a 34-year-old can't do it, information technology'southward worth asking: can an 80-year-former?
Andrew Ferguson writes in The Atlantic that an age limit may exist necessary to break up the gerontocracy — rule past the quondam — within the Democratic Political party, whose leadership is on average 24 years older than that of the Republican Political party. He writes:
At that place is a huge gap between where the energy and creativity of the political party lie, with a grouping of dynamic activists and Business firm members in their 30s and even their 20s (thank you lot, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), and the ruling class of 70-somethings layered far to a higher place like a crumbling porte cochère. … The trick for old folks is to adjust their search for purpose and meaning equally they follow nature's form and give mode to their juniors.
No, at that place shouldn't be an age limit
Calls for disqualifying older candidates in the absence of specific evidence of poor wellness is discriminatory, argues Ashton Applewhite, the author of "This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Confronting Ageism." Statistical relationships between age and cognitive reject, she says, tell usa cipher about individuals running for president, who are de facto atypical. She writes:
Eighty-year-old senators are healthier than the boilerplate octogenarian; many exhibit astonishing intellectual powers and concrete stamina. Nor is Bernie Sanders the boilerplate 78-year-old. Conspicuously he should undergo a concrete test past nonpartisan authorities and make the relevant results public, as should all presidential candidates. … But generalizations nigh the capacities of older people are no more than defensible than racial or gender stereotypes. Period.
Duke Academy professors James Chappel and Sari Edelstein , who study the culture of historic period, write in The Washington Postal service that research shows elderly people are more cognitively capable than common prejudices suggest and in some cases have more to offering than their juniors: Nelson Mandela and Winston Churchill, for example, were effective leaders through their 70s. Dr. Chappel and Dr. Edelstein write:
Rather than contemplate the disqualification of candidates because of their advanced historic period, we would do well to consider how older candidates might bring a heightened awareness to issues of inequality and discrimination, a wealth of policy expertise, and the adroitness and diplomacy that comes with years of experience in the government.
Moreover, as John Della Volpe, the managing director of polling at the Harvard Institute of Politics, pointed out to The Times, a candidate does not have to be of a detail generation to stand for its interests. Support for Mr. Biden and Mr. Sanders, for instance, is deeply polarized past age, with Sanders leading among those nether 35.
Information technology's the age minimum that should become
Americans nether the age of 35 are second-class citizens, the author Osita Nwanevu has argued in Slate. The country's patchwork of age restrictions for federal and state function was born out of the founding fathers' half-baked assumptions, based on personal experience, about youthful incompetence — a patently illogical prejudice , he says, given that 12 of the delegates at the Constitutional Convention, including Alexander Hamilton, were nether 35. (Although since there was little fence on the effect, it's possible the logic was more evident to even those younger delegates at the time.)
But setting aside the question of exactly how erstwhile is old enough to run for office, Mr. Nwanevu writes, information technology makes no sense for that number to be unlike from the voting age:
The result of the nation's age of candidacy laws is that ane-third of American adults — the more 74 million people between 18 to 35 — don't enjoy full political rights: If they're citizens, they have the right to vote without necessarily having the right to be voted for. This is wrong. … A black voter who thinks a black politician would be better attuned to the bug affecting him can vote for a black pol. A woman tin can vote for a woman. Simply a 20-year-one-time cannot, past law, vote to send some other 20-year-old to Congress.
As Matt Yglesias writes for Vox, the Constitution's age requirements tin produce strange contrasts: Donald Trump was able to run for president in 2022 with no political qualifications to speak of, while Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the Democratic Party's most talented operatives, cannot. He writes:
The constitutional prohibition on people under the age of 35 serving as president is merely 1 of these weird lacuna that was handed down to us from the 18th century simply that nobody would seriously propose creating today if not for condition quo bias. Realistically, well-nigh people that immature would merely have a hard time winning an election. But if you tin pull it off, you should exist allowed.
THE TAKEAWAY
During the drafting of the Constitution, only James Wilson, one of the Supreme Courtroom's first justices, opposed its age restrictions. "There was no more reason for incapacitating youth than historic period, where the requisite qualifications were establish," James Madison wrote of Wilson'south dissent. Ane can argue whether using age as a proxy for balloter fitness makes expert sense or bad, but it seems clear that our current arrangement reveals a state of two minds on the question, fencing off public part at one terminate of life but not the other.
Resolving that contradiction, however, would require a constitutional amendment, i that either removes the age floor or imposes a ceiling. Given the nigh insurmountable barriers to changing the Constitution, that'due south unlikely to happen anytime soon.
Do you lot have a signal of view we missed? Email us at debatable@nytimes.com . Please notation your proper noun, age and location in your response, which may be included in the next newsletter.
More PERSPECTIVES
"Historic period has never defined a race and so sharply earlier": Lisa Lerer and Denise Lu look at the carve up within the Autonomous Party on the question of age. [The New York Times]
Ed Kilgore takes a historical view of old presidents. [New York mag]
Can nosotros talk almost Joe Biden's historic period? Michelle Goldberg, David Leonhardt and Ross Douthat discuss on The Argument. [The New York Times]
Bandy X. Lee, an banana clinical professor at the Yale Schoolhouse of Medicine, argues that presidents should have to have a "fitness for duty" exam. [The Conversation]
WHAT YOU'RE Saying
Here's what readers had to say about the final argue: What's the right way to reverse the obesity epidemic?
Elaine from Washington, D.C., pointing to Roxane Gay's memoir, "Hunger," commented that "weight is not just about food": "For sexually abused children, excess weight tin stand for prophylactic, an bodily layer of physical protection. Abuse likewise contributes to depression and other mental problems that can and do lead to eating disorders including overeating."
Emily Swensen from Utah wrote in that standard metrics used to make up one's mind healthy weight, such as trunk mass index, are flawed because they don't distinguish betwixt fat and muscle: "They are decades erstwhile, imprecise and don't reflect modern torso types such as athletic women."
And Barry M. Popkin, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Colina School of Public Health, wrote in that we should accept large-scale regulatory measures, like Chile's new food labeling arrangement: "Countries other than the U.Due south. are increasingly taking on the nutrient industry, whose dual mantras of 'physical action is solution to the problem' and 'we must be part of the solution' has not worked at all."
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/19/opinion/president-age-limit-biden.html
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