Weekly Standard piece<\/a>, \u201cThe Young and Restless,\u201d about the youthfulness of Senators-turned-Presidential candidates.<\/p>\nEmery finds commonalities between the young and restless Senators of the past half-century: Kennedy and Obama, now Cruz and Rubio: \u201cAll were religious and\/or ethnic minorities, all were impatient and restless by nature, and none fits the mold of a Senate insider.\u201d She notes the similarities between the attacks on Kennedy and those on Cruz and Rubio \u2013 missed Senate votes, the irritation they provoke in older, more experienced colleagues, their battles with mentors. Currently, GOP leaders are using the missteps of the Obama years to claim that Cruz and Rubio need more seasoning.<\/p>\n
Emery doesn\u2019t think youth is the problem: \u201cIf youth is the problem, it hasn\u2019t been historically, as we have had presidents younger than Obama who did not leave chaos behind. Theodore Roosevelt, who was just 42 in 1901 when he succeeded the murdered William McKinley, became an iconic world leader. Kennedy, the youngest president ever elected, was 43, four years younger than Obama was when he took office, and he too became an iconic figure and left behind a booming economy and a stable world order (by today\u2019s standards).\u201d She argues that \u201cthe difference was not in their ages but in their temperaments, their political leanings, and the way they reacted to their errors when they committed them, and to the disappointments and failures that came their way.\u201d<\/p>\n
The other problem is the Senate, which is \u201ca bad place from which to try running for President.\u201d Emery argues that \u201cthose people who love the Senate the most, understand it the best, and are able to play it like a musical instrument . . . make the worst showings when running for President.\u201d Presidential candidates need \u201cbig ideas and clear visions,\u201d and the Senate doesn\u2019t encourage these qualities among the older, more experienced members. The Senators most like to succeed in running for a higher office are the ones who have not yet become ensconsed: \u201cthe senators who run effective presidential campaigns tend to be those who don\u2019t much like the Senate and wish to depart it as quickly as possible. . . . When it comes to senators seeking promotion, the young and restless prevail.\u201d Only young Senators can realistically take the stance of reformers, as Cruz especially has done by making himself a nuisance from the moment he arrived in DC. <\/p>\n
Perhaps I\u2019ll have to swallow my ageism, but I do it grudgingly.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I admit a bias at the outset: In 20008, the US elected a President younger than I, and I now find myself older than many leaders in DC, older than many of the writers, columnists and scholars that I learn from. It\u2019s hard to adjust to the fact that \u201cold\u201d Tim Duncan is only a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[99],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-american-politics"],"yoast_head":"\n
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