Stuart Stevens, the top strategist for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, declared to an audience of reporters at a breakfast last month that electing Hillary Rodham Clinton would be like going back in time. “She’s been around since the ’70s,” he said.
At a conservative conference earlier in the year, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, ridiculed the 2016 Democratic field as “a rerun of ‘The Golden Girls,’ ” referring to Mrs. Clinton and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who is 70.
And Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, seizing on the Fleetwood Mac song that became a Clinton family anthem, quipped to an audience in Washington, “If you want to keep thinking about tomorrow, maybe it’s time to put somebody new in.”
The 2016 election may be far off, but one theme is becoming clear: Republican strategists and presidential hopefuls, in ways subtle and overt, are eager to focus a spotlight on Mrs. Clinton’s age. The former secretary of state will be 69 by the next presidential election, a generation removed from most of the possible Republican candidates.
Despite her enduring popularity, a formidable fund-raising network and near unanimous support from her party, Mrs. Clinton, Republican leaders believe, is vulnerable to appearing a has-been.
You know it might help the Republicans to remember their own history, and that their most revered President, Ronald Reagan, was also 69 years old when he ran and won his first term.
Surely they are not saying that because Clinton is an older woman, and not an older man, that she is somehow less fit for office. After all women tend to outlive men in this country by five to six years and often manage to hang to their faculties longer as well.
If they continue to attack Hillary over her age, then after she eviscerates their candidate they will have to admit that they not only got beaten by a woman, but that they were beaten by an "elderly" woman.
THAT is going to leave a mark on some male egos.
