Legal Commentary

Paul's new post on "the Endless Narcissism of a Generation" has me again thinking about age as an extremely important ? and remarkably underexamined ? aspect of federal elections.  Senator Clinton has recently been urging citizens "to think about this decision more like a hiring choice than a voting choice."  Okay, HRC since you asked:

1.  It seems fair and responsible to assume we are making an 8-year hiring decision, since voters will only "fire" an incumbent if he/she is very unpopular and opponents put up an appealing alternative.

2.  We are hiring for the "toughest job in the world,"  a job in which the worker apparently needs to be prepared to take emergency phone calls at 3am and must be ready to lead on Day 1 (though the job comes with a nearly 3-month preparation period between being hired and starting work). 

3.  The skills needed by, and the challenges facing, a president are dynamic and ever-changing: e.g., Prez Bush focused mostly on domestic issues until 9/11, which completely changed the country's needs and his role.  Also, understanding the complexities of the modern world and modern technologies is one obviously important skill for this job.

4.  One of the Prez's most important jobs is to hire great "assistants" for the Cabinet and to support and help ensure effective people are in place to operate the other branches of the federal government and subsidiary businesses (e.g., state governments, private industries, etc.)

5.  Success and failure in this job is properly measured in decades, not weeks or years, and the long-term national forces/spirit that the Prez influences may be more important than any specific short-term policy decisions.

Now, against this backdrop, let's consider our three remaining job candidates in terms of "age."  One would be aged 72 to 80 during his job term; another would be aged 61 to 69 during her job term; another would be 47 to 55 during his job term.

Though I know nothing about labor law and age discrimination law, I suspect a large business picking a new CEO for an eight-year term or a law firm picking a new managing partner for an eight-year term or a law school picking a new dean for an eight-year term would be FAR more likely to favor the younger candidate if all other factors were equal.  Again, I am legally ignorant here, so I do not know if a hiring committee could expressly assert that the two older candidates here are "too old for the job," but I do believe every candid hiring decision-maker would admit that age was one of a number of factors to be justifiably included in a sensible hiring decision for an important and tough 8-year job.

The irony at the Presidential level, at least in my view, is that the age discrimination we are seeing involves the older candidates asserting that the younger candidate is too young and inexperienced to be qualified for this job.  I sense that younger people and more highly educated people are not buying the invitation to engage in reverse age discrimination in their presidential hiring decision, but yesterday's election results suggest that some significant percentage of the voting population may be.

(For a little historical context, consider that Abe Lincoln was "hired" by the American voting population at age 52 , Teddy Roosevelt at age 42, FDR at age 51, John Kennedy at age 43, Ronald Reagan at age 69, Bill Clinton at age 46, George W. Bush at age 54.)