Add a maximum age limit to be president

We 70-somethings aged out of the Oval Office

Next month, presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren and I will both turn 70. Warren will be the fourth septuagenarian in the race, joining Joe Biden (76), Bernie Sanders (77) and Donald Trump, who turns 73 on June 14. I am amazed we chronologically made it this far. Those candidates and I went though the 1980s as young adults. That fact alone should disqualify us from running for president.

The ’80s were exhilarating, then exhausting. We were unsupervised and unchecked, our privacy protected by analog obscurity. Cocaine was ubiquitous. Decadence had no consequences. We had only begun to hear about a disease affecting gay men.

In my 20s, I made countless poor choices that regularly led to spectacular failures (for example, in 1970, I moved to a beach in Sinaloa, Mexico, instead of going to college). As buffer to my habit of making impulsive decisions, I was absurdly lucky. By 1978, I landed in post-Watergate Washington, D.C., with a grown-up career. President Richard Nixon had resigned, and both the American government and I were getting a new start.

Fast-forward to 2019. The past didn’t go anywhere. Archival time capsules are everywhere, and they highlight our midcentury midlife decision-making. While not everyone’s history is as colorful as these senior citizen contenders for 2020, for today’s 70-somethings, it can be terribly uncomfortable that our hard copy records have been digitized and made searchable. Seemingly anyone can unearth acts of our younger selves and upload them to the internet.

While I was learning about politics in Washington, Sanders was fulfilling his civic duty as mayor in Burlington, Vermont. Coincidentally, both of us wrote down our interior thoughts on yellow legal pads. Mine are safely stacked in my office closet, but Sanders’ midlife existential doubts ended up among his official mayoral records, along with an overdue gas bill and a letter from an acquaintance asking Sanders to pay back $250 he had borrowed.

More than three decades later, the humanizing but hardly helpful notesto-self have ended up published. Sanders, approaching middle age, complained that he was losing his radical touch, and that maintaining a socialist “vision is extremely difficult when one is confronted on every corner with the … suffocating force of the status quo.”

While Sanders was stewing over the meaning of his life, 300 miles south, Trump was on a debt-fueled spending spree building his real estate empire in New York and Atlantic City.

Any interior thoughts during the mid-’80s that the media darling might have had have so far been shielded from snoopy reporters (and Congress) by nondisclosure agreements, sealed lawsuits and, perhaps, his early passion for “getting even.” However, The New York Times obtained printouts from his official IRS tax transcripts, from 1985 through 1994, and calculated that Trump claimed $1.17 billion in losses for the period. This allowed Trump to avoid paying income tax for eight of the 10 years.

In response to this public peek into his early approach to playing the system, the president said, “You always wanted to show losses for tax purposes.” Apparently, loading up on loopholes was a common “sport” among real estate developers.

Thanks to my generation’s diminished drive, the field of members competent to sit in the Oval Office has narrowed. That’s as it should be. The future might rest on electing a candidate who can connect with a gender-fluid generation and save the planet. It seems right that we elect a candidate who will make appropriate choices for his or her contemporaries, and the ones who will follow. As I blow out my many birthday candles, I’ll wish for an election that features fresh ideas.

For the long term, maybe we should consider an age limit to bookend the constitutional provision making 35 years old the minimum threshold for presidential authority. A reasonable maximum might be 70, or possibly 75 to accommodate the many geezers who would want to be grandfathered in.