Washington’s Age-Old Problem

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

The New Yorker

President, Barack, News, Politics, Wnyc, Obama, Lizza, Washington, Wickenden

4.3 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 6 September 2023

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In January, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell passed a career milestone: he became the Senate’s longest-serving party leader. Since then, McConnell has suffered a number of health setbacks. This includes a fall and subsequent concussion in March and, most recently, a medical episode at a press conference in which he abruptly froze while taking questions, standing silent and motionless for more than thirty seconds. At age eighty-one, McConnell is hardly the only politician showing his years: the two leading Presidential candidates, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, are the two oldest Presidents in history. Susan B. Glasser, a staff writer and a co-host of the Political Scene’s Washington Roundtable, recently wrote a piece for The New Yorker about what she calls “America’s fragile gerontocracy.” She joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss how baby boomers continue to dominate our political system, and what this could mean for the 2024 Presidential election.

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1:15.1	Music Bay. Things people love. You're listening to the political scene. I'm Tyler Foggett, and I'm a senior editor at The New Yorker.
1:21.0	What I will say is right now the Senate is the most privileged nursing home in the country.
1:26.3	I mean, you know, Mitch McConnell has done some
1:28.6	great things and he deserves credit, but you have to know when to leave. That is why I'm strongly
1:34.3	in support of term limits in this country. I think that we do need mental competency tests for
1:39.3	anyone over the age of 75. I wouldn't care if they did them over the age of 50.
1:52.3	That was Nikki Haley on Fox News earlier this week. She was responding to an incident in which Mitch McConnell froze up in the middle of a press conference, raising questions about his health.
1:57.3	McConnell is 81, which makes him only slightly older than the two leading presidential candidates,
2:02.4	Joe Biden and Donald Trump. But McConnell isn't even the oldest person in the Senate. This past June,
2:08.5	Diane Feinstein turned 90. Susan Glasser recently wrote about the Octogenarians running America
	...

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