I mean presidents older than 70. More and more people are surviving, and in better and better health, well into their 80s.

No, we shouldn’t tolerate presidents with even early dementia, as Reagan obviously had on assuming office (the bit about missiles being recallable was an undeniable memory lacune), and of which McCain gives some, but much less clear, evidence. But only a minority of even 80-year-olds have dementia or any sort of mental impairment. I don’t think that the national supply of politicians with good sense is so huge that we should arbitrarily exclude even one potential good president on the basis of some arbitrary rule — not when the over-70 contribution to the candidate pool is going nowhere but up.

You can weed out the elders who might have cognitive difficulties by using the exact same criteria that every voter should use on every candidate of whatever age. Do they make sense, or not? We might have weeded out Dubya if enough voters had done that due diligence, and no one thinks that his cognitive difficulties have anything to do with age.

You ought to get off the “too old” schtick. it doesn’t really hold up.

I’m not going to disagree with your prior comment, except to say that, by definition, age is something to be considered in a number of different qualification settings, and that McCain’s age in and of itself may not be a factor in electability, but his age and its outward manifestations is, in my opinion. Yes, it’s subjective, but not unimportant.

MaCain is, by many qualified accounts, a very cranky bastard, or, a “prick”. He may well have had physical confrontations with colleagues and subordinates. If you consider age as a factor in, for instance, whether someone is less patient or capable of intense concentration, it’s worth considering.