McCain turns 72 today; Dems place cake ads

McCain will hold a rally today in Dayton with his running mate.

Dallas Morning News

DENVER — John McCain turns 72 today — old enough to be his opponent’s dad. Older than Reagan when he took office. Old enough that Democrats like to throw in loaded phrases like “maybe he’s losing it” when he misspeaks.

The Democratic Party will mark the day with birthday cakes at a dozen cities in battleground states, each aglow with 72 candles. A not-so-subtle jab at McCain’s age? Absolutely not, party officials insist — just a lighthearted way to talk about McCain offering another year of the same GOP policies.

A recent Quinnipiac poll found one in three voters confessed to being somewhat or entirely uncomfortable with the idea of a president taking office at age 72.

Perhaps with good reason, said former House Speaker Jim Wright, who is 86 and lives in Fort Worth, Texas.

“The presidency is the hardest job on Earth,” and with the exception of Ronald Reagan, who “didn’t age visibly,” Wright said, “every president I’ve observed has aged three or possibly even four years for every year in office.”

He laughed with fond thoughts at being McCain’s age again and said McCain’s hawkish foreign policy, not his age, is reason to vote against him.

“Thirty or 40 years ago, that was old; 72 is not as old today as it was then,” he said. ... I would not arbitrarily rule him out on the basis of his age,” he said.

It’s a refrain heard from all the septuagenarians and octogenarians representing Texas Democrats in Denver.

“I don’t feel any older than I did in my 40s,” said Marjorie Reynolds, 73, a Clinton delegate from Lubbock, who retired from the local school district six years ago, then went back to college for a special-education certificate. She’s sure McCain wouldn’t have run if he didn’t feel up to the job — his mother is still spunky at age 95, after all — though she said, “probably he would not want to file again when he’s 76.”

Bob Slagle, a former Texas Democratic chairman who is also 73, noted that voters from 50 to 75 are the most likely to cast ballots. “They are the ones who’ll decide if he’s too old,” he said. “I’m not too old to be president. I don’t know about McCain.”

Delegate Aurora Gonzalez, 76, of Portland, just north of Corpus Christi, owns a beauty shop and lately uses a walker, after a fall that tore a tendon in her knee.

“I just learned to do the computer three weeks ago. More power to him,” she said. “He’s admirable as far as I’m concerned. I admire anyone who does not just sit at home and watch TV.”

The Obama campaign’s official line is that it doesn’t use age as a bludgeon.

“The issue isn’t the number of years that Sen. McCain has spent on this earth, it’s the age of his ideas,” top strategist David Axelrod said Thursday. “He has basically a backward-looking philosophy. He’s embraced discredited doctrines that have led us to the brink of some very, very serious problems. ... But certainly we wish him a happy birthday.”

The Democratic National Committee decided to make some mischief with the birthday cake stunt. One of the dozen or so cakes will be lit near McCain’s rally Friday in Dayton with his new running mate — a running mate the Democrats dub McCain’s “birthday present to himself,” as spokesman Damien LaVera put it. “We’re really excited about it.”

Austin delegate Bertha Means, 88, a retired educator whose campaign slogan was “great-grandmama for Obama,” has no qualms about McCain’s age per se, but echoed Axelrod. “I don’t think he’s up to date on a lot of issues. He’s not into technology. I’m older than he, and I work with my cell phone and my computer and I play golf. To me, it’s not age, it’s how you think.”

And there’s Johnson, grandson of a slave and resident of Shiro, a small town between Huntsville and College Station. He agreed that the key is McCain’s policies, not his age.

“Take it from an old 90-year-old man,” he said. “Our country is in the worst shape it has been in my lifetime. McCain would be an extension of Bush.”