Gee, Ya Think?

Over at The Atlantic, they are stating the obvious, "The Democrats Must Confront Their Gerontocracy," but getting the focus wrong:

Last week, something happened that is extremely rare in Washington, D.C., but completely normal outside of it: People openly described an octogenarian as frail and overdue for retirement. The subject of discussion was Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District of Columbia’s nonvoting congressional delegate, who turned 88 on Friday. Recently, several D.C. figures have questioned her ability to serve. 

………

To a degree that seems bizarre to me as an outsider, the American party system, particularly on the Democratic side, defers to incumbents. (Since the 2022 midterm election, eight members of Congress have died in office. All of them were Democrats.) But in Holmes Norton’s case, something unusual has occurred: People close to her have continued to express concern about her ability to serve, and, even more unusually, have done so under their own names. “As her friend and someone who deeply admires her, I’ve made my peace with recommending to her that I think this is her final term,” the Democratic strategist Donna Brazile told The New York Times. The candor of Perry, Brazile, and others allowed the media to report forthrightly about Holmes Norton’s decline—her forgetting names, communicating in broken sentences, and struggling to read prepared remarks or recognize long-standing colleagues. 

They go on to mention Biden, of course, but not a whisper about Nancy Pelosi or Steny Hoyer's age, for example. 

The author goes on to suggest something like the British Parliamentary system, which gave us a disastrously doddering Winston Churchill in his second time as PM from 1951-1955.

The real problem here though is not that elderly politicians lose their facilities, though obviously some do, it's that old politicians have old ideas, and that when they are unable to address new realities, they fail.  (See Pelosi, Nancy)