Gerontology Chronicles

The Krait (a NY Fishwrap teammate of The Cobra) examines the varieties of ageism in contemporary public life. (Full disclosure: The Krait is 62 years old; the hip view of her age is that today's 60 is the same as her parents' 40.) The foibles of age will become the topic of the first half of this century because there will be more "seniors" clumping around in their velcro-secured sensible footware than ever before. If this is the dawning of the (fair & balanced) Geezer Age, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
The Revenge of Lacey Davenport
By Gail Collins

Millicent Fenwick, the late Congresswoman from New Jersey who everyone connected with the “Doonesbury” character Lacey Davenport, was 64 when she was first elected to the House. That was in 1974, and her victory was referred to as “a geriatric triumph.”

These days, of course, as the first baby boomers are pushing 64, it’s regarded as part of the prime of life. Long, long ago, Mick Jagger used to say that he couldn’t picture singing rock ’n’ roll when he was 40. His message, obviously, was not that the Stones planned to retire, but that Mick planned on remaining in his 30s forever. That which we cannot change, we ignore.

When Fenwick ran for the Senate in 1982 at 72, her opponent, 58-year-old Frank Lautenberg, used the code word “fitness” to suggest, over and over, that she was too old for the job. Pause here to consider the deep, deep irony of the fact that Lautenberg, who won, is now asking the public to re-elect him again so he can stay in office until he’s 90.

“Age is not the factor. The question is effectiveness,” the currently 84-year-old Lautenberg said.

There are several fascinating-to-bizarre aspects to this race. Lautenberg is being challenged in a primary by Representative Robert Andrews, 50. Andrews’s wife, a law professor, is running for his House seat. However, if she wins in the June primary, Camille Andrews has promised to let the party leaders decide who should be the actual candidate. If they choose someone else, she’ll resign as nominee and let them appoint whoever.

“She’s committed to a fair process,” said her husband.

Meanwhile, the Republicans were desperately searching for a self-financing — i.e., really, really rich — Senate candidate. As the deadline loomed, they zeroed in on Andrew Unanue, a 40-year-old nightclub owner who had been chief operating officer of his family’s company, Goya Foods. “Unanue could spark a potential rebirth of the Republican Party in New Jersey. His potential is that great,” a Republican consultant told The Times’s David Chen.

It turned out that Unanue had left Goya in 2004 under less than ideal circumstances — i.e., pushed out by relatives. He denied that he had been guilty of going to work drunk and explained that he had just been going to work hung over. There were apparently problems in getting him to cut short his skiing vacation to come back and announce his candidacy. Scrambling again, the leaders dropped the really-rich requirement and settled on a basic former-Congressman-turned-lobbyist.

The age question is of particular interest this year since John McCain, at 71, is going to try to break the record for oldest newly elected commander in chief. And Bill Clinton did not do his wife any huge favors — as Hillary herself pointed out — when he attacked critics of Hillary’s Bosnia blunder by saying: “Some of them, when they’re 60, they’ll forget something when they’re tired at 11 at night, too.”

Beyond the fact that Hillary had told the Bosnia story in the morning, we have that red phone advertisement. Do we want the president picking it up at 3 a.m. and not being able to remember whether it’s Pakistan or Turkmenistan that has the nuclear weapons?

Representative Andrews says he is absolutely not going to make Lautenberg’s age a campaign issue, and that “the question is: who has plans and energy and focus to get things done.” He is demanding seven debates during the seven weeks between now and the primary, possibly because Lautenberg is not a great extemporaneous speaker. Or then again, it could be a subtle attempt to inflict death by debating.

Lautenberg is actually not really, really old by Senate standards, which are even more generous than baby-boomer standards. Another 84-year-old, Republican Ted Stevens of Alaska, is also running for re-election this year, but there are so many terrible things about Stevens that voters are really not going to have to think about the age thing at all.

Robert Byrd of West Virginia was re-elected in 2006 at 88. “I’m told that 90 is the new 80,” he said. He is now 90 and, as president pro tem of the Senate, is third in line to the presidency. (Let’s take a minute out and try to imagine what would happen if a series of crises struck the country so that we ran through the line of succession in rather short order. Governed by Dick Cheney. Then Nancy Pelosi. Then Robert Byrd. Then Condoleezza Rice. It sounds like the kind of experiment they perform on lab rats.)

My theory is that the age issue is not all that huge a deal when it comes to legislators. If you’re old and in good shape, the big problem is that it’s hard to think about things in new ways. You tend to get better and better at a narrower and narrower set of skills. For the U.S. Senate, this is not really a concern since doing the same thing over and over is pretty much the name of the game.

[Gail Collins was the Editorial Page Editor of The New York Times from 2001 to January 1, 2007. She was the first woman Editorial Page Editor at the Times. Before the Editorial Page, Collins was an editorial board member and columnist on the op-ed page. On October 12, 2006, she announced that she would step down as Editorial Page Editor, effective this year. Collins took the year off to write a book, and returned to the Times as a columnist starting in July 2007. Her column appears on Thursdays and Saturdays.

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, as Gail Gleason, Collins has a degree in journalism from Marquette University and an M.A. in government from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Prior to The New York Times, Collins wrote for the New York Daily News, Newsday, Connecticut Business Journal, United Press International, and the Associated Press in New York City.

Collins also founded the Connecticut State News Bureau which operated from 1972 to 1977 and provided coverage of the state capital and Connecticut politics. When it was sold, the company served more than thirty weekly and daily newspaper clients.

Beyond her work as a journalist, Collins has published several books; Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity and American Politics, America's Woman: Four Hundred Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines, and The Millennium Book which she co-authored with her husband Dan Collins.

She was also a journalism instructor at Southern Connecticut State University.]

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