Sam Smith – I won’t be running for president
next year. The reasons are mostly the same that have kept me from running in
the past: Nobody has asked me to run, I couldn’t raise the money or the votes
to win, and I would hate the job.
This
year, however, there’s an added reason: I’m old.
I turned
81 back in November and the thought of even running for my town council seems
absurd. This despite the fact that I have lived a exceptionally healthy life,
interrupted only by a weight lifting accident some decades back and prostate
cancer in the early 1990s
But a
couple of years ago, as I was moving a portable generator around, I did
something to my back that set off irreversible signs that my days of doing
whatever I wanted, such as regularly pumping iron or bouncing around in a small
boat, were over. I had already “swallowed the anchor,” a term for those of the
sea no longer comfortable there. I had sold my boat because of my lack of
predictable balance and adequately fast response.
Since
then I have become a slow moving, slow step climbing arthritic careful of what
I do next.
Why am I
bothering you with this? Simply because this personal transition has occurred in
precisely the same time period that would represent the administration of a Joe
Biden or Bernie Sanders if they were elected next year. Sanders would turn 80
in 2021 and Biden in 2022.
Admittedly
neither I nor they suffer from amnesia or other gross mental deficiencies of
the present younger White House incumbent, but the changes that have occurred
in my energy, balance, enthusiasm and drive in the past few years makes me wary
of trusting the whole nation to someone of my ilk.
I
recognize the statistical inaccuracy of using my experience as a formula and I
realize, for example, that Raymond Kelly, New York’s police commissioner, was
born four days before Bernie Sanders. Nevertheless, it’s a fair issue to raise
and see what the candidates do about it. Clearly picking the right vice
president is at the top of the list.
I admire
Sanders and Biden for their efforts – in Sanders’ case back to the 1980s when
he was mayor of Burlington Vermont for four terms - and hope I am no prediction
of their future condition. But it’s something worth mentioning and thinking about.
