The Democrats ought to worry about Hillary's health

Everybody is mad at Karl Rove, but not, of course, for all the good reasons for being mad at him. From the NYT:

Mrs. Clinton was hospitalized for a few days at the beginning of 2013 after sustaining a concussion, which led to a blood clot in a vein between her brain and her skull behind her right ear. 

“There’s nothing to it,” Mr. Clinton said of Mr. Rove’s remarks, pronouncing himself “sort of dumbfounded” at the suggestion. He did acknowledge that Mrs. Clinton had suffered a “very serious concussion,” and that it had taken her months to fully recover.

There's too much deference toward big shots in America. The health issues of Presidential frontrunners ought to be fair game. 

Serious health problems can have long term consequences, especially as you get older. I think it took me about ten years to recover from cancer and chemotherapy when I was 38. Currently, I seem to be -- knock on wood -- enjoying better health than I did in my 40s.

As you get older, it's harder and harder to spring back from health traumas. My mother had cancer in her early 60s. She lived another 16 years, but she remarked that because of it she went from middle-aged to old almost overnight. I doubt if Ronald Reagan ever really recovered from being shot in 1981 when he was 70.

Hillary will have just turned 69 on election day in 2016. If everything goes according to her plan, she'll be 73 when she's up for re-election. The Democrats should seriously look into Karl Rove's warning for their own good. 

The Republican have nominated a lot of older candidates lately and it hasn't done them much good. In the post-Reagan era, the three times the GOP won the White House their candidates averaged 59. The four times they lost their candidates averaged 69.

The four times the Democrats have won since Reagan, their winners averaged 48.5. The three times the Democrats lost, their candidates averaged 57.

Obviously, these sample sizes are tiny. Still, these numbers ought to give the Democrats pause before blindly adopting for Hillary's benefit the GOP's strategy of nominating elder statesmen who have come close in the past like Dole, McCain, and Romney.

  

In general, people now seem to be able to function at a high level longer than when I was young. That's a very good thing. 

Still, I'm concerned that improvements in plastic surgery and cosmetics have given us an unrealistic sense of our leaders as impervious to aging. Hillary, for example, looked terrific when she ran for President at age 60 against Obama. She may have looked better than when she was 30 and didn't believe in all that sexist nonsense about getting your hair styled by an expert, much less having a little work done.

But we shouldn't be so quick to police our skeptical thoughts about our rulers perhaps not being wholly superior to the rest of us.

P.S. What's the maximum age to command a nuclear missile submarine? All I can find is the average age of the Old Man:

How old is the commanding officer of a submarine? 

The average age of a Commanding Officer is 38-42.

   
That's a running joke in Heinlein's sci-fi novels for boys. The young ensigns on the starship all assume the Old Man is as old as the hills, but eventually you figure out that the venerable captain isn't quite 40.