McCain Too Old to be President?

Obama won't say it but I will. The job of being President requires vigor. We cannot afford to elect someone who could be too weak physically to do the job. His mental lapses raises serious questions. John F. Kennedy might have been too sickly to be President in 1960. Reagan showed signs of Alzheimer's while in office. It is a legitimate issue:

According to a new poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, voters who do not like John McCain feel that way not because of the type of person he is, but because of his beliefs.

John McCain’s negatives among registered voters hit an all time high of 34 percent in a recent NBC/Wallstreet Journal poll.

The recent Pew Research Center poll asked voters to describe McCain in one word. The poll found the most common word voters associated with McCain was “old”. “Maverick”, “reformer”, “change”, and “independent” were not the words that came to voters minds.

McCain some how did manage to get voters to say; "honest," "experienced," "patriot," and "conservative".

Obama was able to use Hillary Clinton’s experience in the primary as a negative and could potentially use it against McCain as well. Voters do not see McCain as the change candidate and his experience in Washington could be used to show he is just another insider.

This from CNN:

Listen to some Democrats, and you'll think the 71-year-old Arizona senator is a man lost in a perpetual fog. He is "confused" and has "lost his bearings" or is "out of touch."

Listen to the McCain campaign, and you'll be convinced that Democrats are using those terms to exploit concerns that the presumptive Republican nominee is too old to effectively serve as president.

For his part, McCain tends to answer questions about his age with quips such as, "I'm older than dirt and have more scars than Frankenstein, but I've learned a few things along the way."

The first salvo of the general election's age war may have been launched in May, when Sen. Barack Obama argued in an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer that McCain had "lost his bearings" while pursuing the Republican nomination.

The McCain camp claimed that Obama's use of that phrase was "a not particularly clever way of raising John McCain's age as an issue."

Last Wednesday, the issue reemerged when McCain appeared on NBC's "Today" Show and argued, as he has before, that "it's not important" when troops return from Iraq as long as casualties are held to a minimum.

Sen. John Kerry, an Obama supporter, said in a hastily arranged conference call that McCain is "unbelievably out of touch" and that it "is really becoming more crystal clear... that John McCain simply doesn't understand [the conflict]. He confuses who Iran is training, he confuses what the makeup of al Qaeda is, [and] he confuses the history ... of what has happened between Sunni and Shia."

Susan Rice, one of Obama's top foreign policy advisers, said that McCain had demonstrated a "pattern of confusing the basic facts and reality that pertain to Iraq."

When asked if he was trying to highlight the age issue through his choice of words, Kerry said it was "unfair" and "ridiculous" to make such an assertion. Rice said she was simply highlighting the fact that, in her opinion, McCain has his facts wrong.