Will He Be Our Oldest President
When Cameras Are in the Room, Keep Your Head Up and Smile.
Beyond its fulfillment of a constitutional requirement, the president’s annual State of the Union address has come to provide much pomp. It’s a prime-time gala where Washington’s best and brightest gather for an evening in the media spotlight, and where the nation tunes in with varying degrees of interest, cynicism or boredom at the bloated spectacle of it all. The odds for climactic elements — for truly earth-moving, unexpected locutions — are so low as to be negligible.
Copies of the speech are customarily distributed to members of the news media ahead of time — on the condition, of course, that they not be published until after the president begins his delivery. But in the age of the Internet, even that handshake agreement between the press and president has broken down: Copies of the speech could be found at sites like the Drudge Report and ThinkProgress.org well before President Bush began his address shortly after 9 p.m. last Tuesday. “We’ll start respecting White House embargoes when they start telling the truth,” wrote the editors at Think Progress.
It is, perhaps, also no surprise in the age of YouTube — where unscripted video clips have become political Molotov cocktails — that a “McCain sleeping” snippet was uploaded to the Internet and was being discussed and linked in short order. Whether the original intent was political sabotage or simple humor is hard to say, but either way the clip went straight for Mr. McCain’s Achilles’ heel: his age. He is now 70 years old. By 2008, if elected, he would be the oldest president to move into the White House.
There’s no question in anyone’s mind that the YouTube culture — in which every public moment can be clipped, cropped and distributed instantly across the globe by anyone at any time — had changed the rules of the game. As with the broken embargo on the State of the Union speech, there is no longer the default expectation that exposure can be managed. All bets are off. The theory of Mr. McCain’s supposed nap got an early boost from Tucker Carlson of MSNBC, who was blogging the speech live at hardblogger.msnbc.msn.com.
“If you’re McCain, who will be over 70 by 2008, you’ll want to make doubly sure to demonstrate your alertness and vigor,” Mr. Carlson wrote just after 10 p.m. Tuesday. “You definitely won’t want to slump in your seat, out cold, when Bush starts talking about Iraq. And yet that’s exactly what McCain did tonight, napping on camera for 10 agonizing seconds.” Though the clip was not created by an opposing campaign, it was probably identified by at least one of those campaigns as a tool to swipe at McCain to help make the argument that McCain is ‘too old’ to be president, and passed it along to Drudge.
August 30th, 2008 at 7:14 am
On John McCain possibly being the ‘oldest’ President in history… Technically that is correct, but if you factor in relative life expectancy - there are other Presidents in history that were probably relatively older for the time in which they lived. For example, James Buchanan or Zachary Taylor were 65 and 64 respectively when they took office. But the life expectancy for them at their age, at that time in history (mid-1800s) was probably about 76 years old (a gap of 11-12 years). Correspondingly, John McCain can probably expect to live to 85 according to todays life expectancy rates (and based on his current age). A gap of 13 years. This puts him in the company of other Presidents, such as John Adams, Andrew Jackson - and probably even Reagan.
I’m not saying that McCain isn’t old, he is a twitchy old codger who looks like his breath smells - but history has probably had ‘older’ Presidents.