Mitch McConnell and the Discourse of Old Age
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“The press seems relentlessly focused on the status of the elderly,” Lucy Schiller writes for CJR this week. At eighty, Joe Biden is the oldest president the United States has ever had. Donald Trump, his predecessor and likeliest rival in the 2024 election, is seventy-seven. And as the Washington Post has pointed out, the Senate is at its oldest in history. Haley, too, was recently in the news as part of the same generational plotline: she said that aging politicians should undergo mental-competency tests; …. In 1900, gerontologists considered ‘old’ to be forty-seven. Today, you are ‘youngest-old’ at sixty-five, ‘middle-old’ at seventy-five, and at eighty-five”—joining the ranks of Senators McConnell, Feinstein, and Chuck Grassley—“you are a member of the ‘oldest-old.’”
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