We need chart to track Dem hopefuls

We now have so many potential candidates for president, it’s very difficult to talk about them without whipping out a chart.

Last week Michael Bloomberg took his name off the list, so we’ve hardly got two dozen.

Very sorry to see Bloomberg go. His departure came just after Fortune announced he was ranked the ninth-richest billionaire on the planet, which is 706 places higher than Donald Trump. It would have been fun pointing that out several times a day for the entire campaign.

But if you’ve got more than $55 billion, there are probably more fun things to do over the next year than introducing yourself to every person in Iowa. So let’s see if we can master what’s left of the list.

Today we’ll take it easy and consider only the 14 who have actually announced they’re running for the nomination. We will then instantly subtract the spiritual lecturer, the former tech executive and the guy-who-wasonce-in-the-House. Great! We’re down to 11.

That includes two newbies, John Hickenlooper, the former governor of Colorado, and Jay Inslee, the governor of Washington.

Then there’s South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

No one agrees entirely on how to pronounce his name, but one of the versions the candidate seems to like is “bootedge-edge.” In Maltese it means “lord of the poultry.”

See how much you’re learning? Wait till you throw that one out at a dinner party.

Buttigieg is the youngest candidate, at 37, and he’d be the first commander in chief under the age of 40.

Buttigieg has been pushing the age issue, arguing that millennials are due for some “intergenerational justice.” It’s getting a lot of traction — do you think Donald Trump (72) has spawned a don’t-trust-anybodyover-70 movement? If so, it’d be a problem for Bernie Sanders (77) and the still-unannounced Joe Biden (76).

Next you’ve got Hickenlooper, 67, and Inslee, 68, as well as Elizabeth Warren, 69. Historically, being a presidential candidate in your 60s has only been a problem for one gender. When Sen. Margaret Chase Smith ran for the Republican nomination in 1964, she complained that “almost every news story starts off with ‘the 66-year-old senator.’ I declare I haven’t seen the age played up in the case of men candidates.”

Also an L.A. Times columnist argued that age was indeed an issue because the ideal age for a presidential candidate was in the late 40s or 50s, and that was when “the female of the species undergoes physical changes and emotional distress of varying severity and duration.”

OK, this is the end of our age discussion.

For everybody else, time is fleeting. We’re talking about a Democratic nominating convention that’s happening in July 2020, but there seems to be a consensus that even waiting for Easter of 2019 is very chancy.

You can tell who’s sidling up. Sen. Sherrod Brown had been conducting a “Dignity of Work” tour through New Hampshire, Iowa and South Carolina. You could not have a better hint if he ran around the country ringing a large Liberty Bell, but he then said he would not run.

Beto O’Rourke has been promising to make an announcement any second, but the most dramatic thing he’s done lately was to show up for a Metallica concert. It is possible to be too cool to rule.

Almost everybody seems to think Biden will jump in eventually. But really, Mr. Former Vice President, it’s possible to be too coy. This week a CNN focus group made up of six people said they thought you were too old-news.