The age factor.

• Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara
• Position: Humor - perennial presidential candidate Bob Dole - Column

Is Dole Too Old for the Job?" demanded the cover of last week's Time magazine. Not is he too calculating, embittered, or conservative--but is he "too old." When the questions descend, as they inevitably do, from the political to the physiological, we know that the serious campaign analysis has begun, Is Bill's cholesterol too high, as Dole charged at a governor's conference a few days ago? Is Newt too fat? Will seventy-two-year-old Dole, like Reagan before him, be a flatliner before his second term is over?

The Dole question is especially poignant because, in addition to the "age factor," the best-known feature of candidate Dole is that it's "his turn." Year after year, he has stood scowling in the wings as lesser and often younger men bounded ahead of him. Now that it's finally "his turn," as he has repeatedly noted, is it fair to declare him too old to take it? The same thing, tragically, could happen to any of us. My turn, for example, should come up some time within the next few hundred million years, if the laws of probability continue to apply--and when my time rolls around, I don't want to hear a lot of carping about whether I've still got what it takes to run the country.

One thing in Dole's--and my--favor is that it takes less and less as time goes on. When the Presidency involved minding a huge government bureaucracy, it was important to have a fellow spry enough to sit upright through entire afternoons at a stretch. But now, thanks to the Republican Congress, the functions of the federal government have been reduced to the issuing of commemorative stamps and occasional pronouncements on Bosnia, a job that could be performed (and probably is) from the shadowy realm of dementia. Surely then it is time to relax medical standards and declare the President's job open to anyone who can muster a discernible pulse.

But as Dole's pollsters must realize, Americans are deeply conflicted on the subject of age.

On the one hand, we are constantly exhorted to see the march to the grave as a marvelous adventure and opportunity for "growth." In her latest book, New Passages, life-cycle theorist Gail Sheehy gives the decades of decline bouncy names like "the Flaming Fifties" and "the Sage Seventies" and argues that aging should be more accurately termed "saging." Thus Dole should be automatically preferable to the chronically callow Clinton, and if we can't have Dole, someone should defrost Den Xiaoping.

On the other hand, there's a growing public...