Is Feinstein’s age a plus, not a minus?

It’s not new, the worrying by Californians that our senior senator, Dianne Feinstein, is rather too senior for the job. She is, after all, 88 years old. Carpers claim that Joe

Biden is too long in the tooth to be president, and he’s almost a decade younger than Feinstein.

So the recent San Francisco Chronicle story that cites anonymous United States Senate colleagues and political staffers who say that in recent months, especially since the illness and then death of her husband, Feinstein’s memory has been fading, and that she has a difficult time grasping complex political issues, is really only the latest in a long series of such articles over the years.

But there’s another point of view out there. None of us is getting any younger, after all. Tens of millions of Californians are at or near Feinstein’s age. People live dramatically longer than they did on average just a few generations ago. Old people deserve representation in Washington, D.C., too.

Is Feinstein’s age in that sense a political plus, rather than a minus?

That’s our Question of the Week for our readers.

In “one very important respect, every day Feinstein remains in office, she provides Californians with an indispensable example,” writes Connecting California columnist Joe Mathews. “When we look at our senator, we are looking in a mirror.”

It’s not the super-seniors, after all, who are abandoning our state for greener Idaho pastures. It’s the young who are leaving. Eighty-somethings need politicians who understand the need to protect Social Security, to strengthen our healthcare system, to provide affordable housing, to value the contributions of society’s elders.

And the sheer numbers show that California’s seniors will increasingly need representation from someone who understands their needs: “State analyses suggest that the post-85 group will dominate the 2030s, with an additional 10.8 million people joining the state’s older population by 2030,” Mathews notes.

Should Feinstein therefore at the very least serve out her term that ends in 2024?

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