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McCain's age subject of its own debate

BY FAYE FIORE | Los Angeles Times

March 4, 2008

DOYLESTOWN, Pa. - Frankie La Rosa likes everything about John McCain's politics. He likes his moderation. He likes his integrity. He even read one of his books. But when the primary rolls around here April 22, he plans to vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Why? Because McCain, 71, would be the oldest president ever elected to a first term and in La Rosa's book, that's just too old. La Rosa knows this because he's old, too - 78. "I've got my brain but physically, you're kidding yourself," La Rosa says.

He has just finished a carton of red Jell-O and a banana at the back table of the Bagel Barrel, where some locals have gathered to talk politics. La Rosa is a retired financial adviser from Merrill Lynch and his mind is as sharp as a Dow Jones spike. But he discovered after his second bypass surgery three months ago that you cross 75 and - wham! - you never know what's going to hit you.

"I had no symptoms. I was great. But I had a heart murmur nobody knew about and I had to have a new valve put in," he says. "The body just can't take it. I like McCain, I really do. But I am concerned about his age."

McCain's maturity hasn't stopped his steady march toward the GOP nomination. And most voters didn't have any pause electing Ronald Reagan at 69 and again at 73.

In this season of identity politics - with women leaning toward Clinton and blacks toward Barack Obama - older voters do tilt to McCain. He has held his own with the 60-plus set in most early primary states, although not by enormous margins. But many seniors seem drawn to the Arizona senator despite his age, not because of it.

So here in Pennsylvania - where the retiree population is second only to Florida in size, pensions aren't taxed and seniors zoom through the aisles of the Acme supermarket on motorized carts - we set out to ask older people, who arguably are best positioned to know: Is John McCain too old to be president?

"Hell no!" John Farrell, 83, said, on his way into the Acme to buy food for his cat, Angel. He has just parked in a lot filled with Buicks and Chevrolets the size of battleships, this being the strip mall closest to two senior apartment complexes.

Farrell spent 21 years in the Navy. Military service, not age, is what he identifies with in McCain - the former Navy fighter pilot who spent 5 1/2 years in a POW camp.

"Just because you're a little older doesn't mean you're senile," Farrell says, as a man on a little scooter with a big orange flag roars by.

At town hall meetings around the country, at least one voter typically asks McCain about his age. "I'm older than dirt, have more scars than Frankenstein," he likes to joke, but insists his memory is fine "except for hiding my own Easter eggs." Still, his campaign takes pains to stress his vigor, asserting the Arizona senator's breakneck schedule wears out his younger aides.

McCain boasts he can "out-campaign" candidates decades younger and hiked the Grand Canyon only two summers ago with his son, Jack, "29 miles rim to rim in 130-degree heat." Periodically, he sandwiches himself between his 53-year-old blond wife, Cindy, and his sprightly 96-year-old mother, Roberta, who was, we are reminded, once refused a rental car in Paris, so she went out and bought one.

George Fisk, an 85-year-old retired business administration professor, takes in this information, unimpressed. At 71, he was "going gangbusters," too. What puzzles him is not whether McCain can do the world's hardest job but why he'd want to.

"He ought to have his head examined," Fisk suggests. "I could go out and work right now, if I could take a nap every afternoon," Fisk announces.

Being older than 70 doesn't mean you're washed up, these men agree, but the weight of the presidency gives them pause, the more they think about it.