There was a good discussion in the comments of the post on Platner, and age came up. I want to make a quick point on that — we’re the outlier in the ages of our parties leaders, certainly in North America. It’s hard to compare apples to apples, but let’s look at the cabinets of the Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney (61 years old) and the President of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum (63).
Here’s Carney’s cabinet. If you take a look, it appears that very few of them are even Carney’s age, and nobody’s older. Unfortunately, the Wikipedia entries on these people are sparse, so I couldn’t check the age of the ones who looked older, but clearly the Liberals in Canada don’t have a bunch of 70+ cabinet members. The Speaker of Parliament in 68. The cabinet in a parliamentary system like Canada reveals the potential new leaders of the party, so I think it’s fairly reasonable to say that the center-left party of Canada is, compared to the Democrats, pretty young. And, compared to the Democrats, there are more women in positions of power in Carney’s cabinet than in the Democratic party.
Moving on to Mexico, a couple of pictures tell the story:
The man on the far right, Sacristian, retired, as did the man to Claudia’s right, de la Fuente, who is now 74. Ebrard, standing to Claudia’s left, is 69. The woman with white hair, Barcéna, is 74. The woman to her right retired.
Kersenobich is at the far left of this picture
The only member of Claudia’s cabinet over 74 who remains is Dr David Kersenobich, who is 83 and he’s clearly there for a reason — he’s a talented research physician who has credibility as the man who trained almost every liver specialist practicing in Mexico today. And he’s still very sharp. He’s the exception that proves the rule, and his job is arguably one of the most important ones for Claudia, Morena and Mexico. I don’t know enough about the Mexican legislature to weigh in on the ages there, but the President of the Senate is 68, the President of the Chamber of Deputies (like the House) is 51 and the newly named leader of Morena is 52. All are women, by the way — yet again, the supposedly “macho” Mexican culture is far more able to promote women to positions of power than we are.
Both Mexico and Canada seem to be running quite well with non-octogenarians in positions of power. We’re the “exception” when it comes to the age of our leadership, but our government and our party certainly isn’t “exceptional”.
