FURTHER COMMENT

...In her latest book, New Passages, life-cycle theorist Gail Sheehy gives the decades of decline bouncy names like "the Flaming Fifties" and "the Sage Seventies" and argues that aging should be more accurately termed "saging...

...Year after year, he has stood scowling in the wings as lesser and often younger men bounded ahead of him...

...He has had himself photographed "working out" on his home treadmill (though this widely published image shows him dressed, as if by an absent-minded mortician, in a freshly pressed long-sleeved shirt and boxer shorts...

...Will seventy-two-year-old Dole, like Reagan before him, be a flatliner before his second term is over...

...To say that your beloved's eccentricities are "getting a little old" is to advertise your renewed availability...

...As a result, we cannot approach a person older than forty without cringing from the potential randy evidences of decay...

...In fact, "old" has become one of the most dismissive insults in the American language, deployed interchangeably now with "tiresome...

...And, of course, he has done all he can to forestall suspicions of any hidden tendency to senile soft-hearted-ness: he denounced unwed mothers, recanted his former support for affirmative action, and firmly advocated the citizen's right to bear AK-47s...

...Is Bill's cholesterol too high, as Dole charged at a governor's conference a few days ago...

...But as Dole's pollsters must realize, Americans are deeply conflicted on the subject of age...

...Just as in the past, when candidates used to issue "position papers," he has dismichael duffy tributed a nine-page medical report proudly extolling his blood chemistry, urinalysis, and EKG results...

...On the other hand, there's a growing public awareness that the "journey" of aging does not proceed through a garden of roses...

...The Dole question is especially poignant because, in addition to the "age factor," the best-known feature of candidate Dole is that it's "his turn...

...When the questions descend, as they inevitably do, from the political to the physiological, we know that the serious campaign analysis has begun...

...Politely speaking, there are no "old" men or women, only "older" ones— who get "older" and "older," until, at age ninety or so, they are admitted to be finally "old...

...Much depends on how Clinton responds to the cholesterol charges and on whether one of the other Republican candidates can suddenly produce a superior EKG tracing or a freshly fathered out-of-wedlock child...

...Will Dole successfully counter the forces of ageism...

...Hence the Dole campaign's desperate defensive-ness on the matter of age...

...Not is he too calculating, embittered, or conservative—but is he "too old...

...As to whom one should vote for or what it all means—only a highly trained physician, backed up by a corps of technicians, is in a position to say for sure.e Barbara Ehrenreich is the author, most recently, of "The Snarling Citizen...

...When the Presidency involved minding a huge government bureaucracy, it was important to have a fellow spry enough to sit upright through entire afternoons at a stretch...

...Is Newt too fat...

...But now, thanks to the Republican Congress, the functions of the federal government have been reduced to the issuing of commemorative stamps and occasional pronouncements on Bosnia, a job that could be performed (and probably is) from the shadowy realm of dementia...

...Thus Dole should be automatically preferable to the chronically callow Clinton, and if we can't have Dole, someone should defrost Den Xiaoping...

...The same thing, tragically, could happen to any of us...

...One thing in Dole's—and my—favor is that it takes less and less as time goes on...

...My turn, for example, should come up some time within the next few hundred million years, if the laws of probability continue to apply—and when my time rolls around, I don't want to hear a lot of carping about whether I've still got what it takes to run the country...

...Prime-time television commercials have become obsessed, just in the last few years, with offerings aimed at the aging and aged, and these are not, alas, condoms and running shoes, but nostrums for "denture odor," canned milk shakes for those who have retired from the business of masticating, and, most ominously, "incontinence products...

...He or she may be glowing with health and sex appeal—thanks to artful hair coloring and extensive surgical editing—yet be in urgent need of a diaper change...

...Surely then it is time to relax medical standards and declare the President's job open to anyone who can muster a discernible pulse...

...Now that it's finally "his turn," as he has repeatedly noted, is it fair to declare him too old to take it...

...On the one hand, we are constantly exhorted to see the march to the grave as a marvelous adventure and opportunity for "growth...