WASHINGTON: Donald Trump is 70, Hillary Clinton is 69, and between them, with their combined age, they stack up as the oldest presidential candidates to contest for the White House, a place where only two previous occupants (Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan) served into their 70s.
The median age of US presidents on their final day in office is 59. Barack Obama, George Bush, Bill Clinton have kept it below 60 in a sub-50s tradition that includes Millard Fillmore (53), James Polk (53), Franklin Pierce (52) and Theodore Roosevelt (50), and youngest, John Kennedy (46) and James Garfield (49), both of whom were assassinated.
Bill Clinton was the youngest retiree at 54; Obama will be well short of 56 when he demits office.
If Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton manage to serve two terms, they will be challenging the record of Ronald Reagan, who left the White House at 77 and holds the record for the oldest serving president. A two-term Trump will break that record.
So it's somewhat of a mystery that Trump fanboys have launched a whisper campaign about Hillary's age in an attack that many feminists regard as sexist. After all, no one questions Trump's age, even though he is a year older.
Besides, life expectancy of American females is almost five years more than for men -81.2 years for women; 76.4 years for men. If he lives only up to the median age, Trump will be dead before two terms; Hillary will survive well after.
All this is rapidly becoming sly grist for the campaign mill. On Monday, Trumpbacking websites prominently displayed a photograph of Hillary Clinton being helped up the steps to a porch, with links related to her other purported accidents and illnesses, including falling while boarding a plane, and treatment for a blood clot. The unsubtle message: She is not physically fit to hold office.
Trump himself went one step further by calling Hillary “unhinged“ -suggesting that she is not mentally fit either, even as liberal commentators are questioning the Republican candidate's own mental balance.
Over the weekend, NYT columnist Maureen Dowd skewered Trump in an op-ed where she evoked a scenario of Trump being treated at mental facility after he has lost the election to Clinton.
Any which way you look at it, this election is one for the ages, and of the ages.
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