View source for Workflow/186

{{Workflow
|Plaintiff verdict=No
|Stage=Needs judge
|Filed by=User:Frank
|Case ID=AffGac9adEaf6ga3iaDe
|Lie=Aging Leaders Hurt America
|Topic=Not a lie!
|Accusation=America’s leadership class is increasingly older, with many politicians seeking election well beyond the time that most retire. But what if the concern over a longtime politician’s age has less to do with fear that the candidate might die or become incapacitated — and more to do with whether trying to snag yet another term at an age when almost everyone else is retired is just plain arrogant and greedy?

Iowa’s Senator Chuck Grassley makes a good test of that question — a test that merits attention from elected officials across this geriatric-run country..

Unlike Senate colleagues such as California Democrat Dianne Feinstein, Grassley has never been trailed by reports that he’s losing his marbles. Unlike a whole slew of other senators — including much younger pols like 50-year-old New Mexico Democrat Ben Ray Luján, who suffered a stroke — he hasn’t missed significant chunks of time due to serious health issues. His ad touts his best-in-the-Senate attendance record.

And yet a poll published this week that has shocked political pros in the state suggests voters have serious qualms about Grassley’s age. The survey, by the veteran Iowa polling firm Selzer & Co., reported that Grassley was running only 3 points ahead of his Democratic challenger, Mike Franken. Iowa’s Republican governor, meanwhile, was leading her race by 17 points, according to the survey, conducted with the Des Moines Register.

Despite months of Grassley-the-pushup-pro messaging, some 60 percent of respondents, including more than a third of Republicans, told pollsters that they thought age was a concern.

The question that ought to occupy the minds of people like the incumbent president of the United States (who turns 80 this fall), his most likely 2024 challenger (now 76), the Democratic triumvirate atop the House of Representatives (82, 83 and 82) and maybe the entire Senate (the oldest in American history) is: What kind of concern? If nobody is challenging the notion that Grassley is physically and mentally up to the job, shouldn’t everything be fine?

Not for everybody.

From NYT:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/14/us/politics/youth-voters-midterms-polling.html

Alexandra Chadwick went to the polls in 2020 with the single goal of ousting Donald J. Trump. A 22-year-old first-time voter, she saw Joseph R. Biden Jr. as more of a safeguard than an inspiring political figure, someone who could stave off threats to abortion access, gun control and climate policy.

Two years later, as the Supreme Court has eroded federal protections on all three, Ms. Chadwick now sees President Biden and other Democratic leaders as lacking both the imagination and willpower to fight back. She points to a generational gap — one she once overlooked but now seems cavernous.

“How are you going to accurately lead your country if your mind is still stuck 50, 60 or 70 years ago?” Ms. Chadwick, a customer service representative in Rialto, Calif., said of the many septuagenarian leaders at the helm of her party. “It’s not the same, and people aren’t the same, and your old ideas aren’t going to work as well anymore.”
|Locations=https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/10/21/voters-worried-chuck-grassley-age-00062805
|Markup=<i>The problem of America’s gerontocracy is not one of infirm or senescent leadership, but one of an increasingly impenetrable elite with entrenched habits and jobs that are entitlements, who are surrounded by staff who shield them from the real world.</i>
|uuid=38e7f993-9c00-4825-ae9b-1c91962f59d6
|Random judge=User:TiCaudata
}}