Are You Too Old to Be President?

Biden’s senior moments are a bipartisan concern

One day, a classmate taunted me that my father was too old to be president. The incident occurred a few years after John F. Kennedy had become America’s youngest elected president and people were enamored with his apparent youth and vigor. (Teddy Roosevelt, America’s youngest president, assumed office following the assassination of President McKinley.)

In retrospect, my classmate’s insult might have been labeled a micro-aggression, but back then, I sufficed with going home crying to my mother.

My mother, who had little formal education but held a master’s degree in chinuch, gave me a homework assignment. Open an encyclopedia and look up the average age at which US presidents were inaugurated. That average age was 54. (It’s even higher today.) My father could still make the grade! I shared the research with my classmate, and he was humbled.

Neither of our fathers ever became president, but with 2024 in sight, an old classroom debate has become a major campaign issue.