Mental competency tests are not necessarily a useful tool to assess a person’s leadership ability, experts say.
It’s also important not to generalize, since the aging process doesn’t look the same for everyone. “There are huge individual differences in how people age. Some are sharp as a tack at 90 or 100, some have cognitive impairment in their 50’s,” Aldwin said.Aldwin, Reuben and Nace also felt Haley’s suggestion could easily be flipped, opening the door to questioning younger politicians’ mental fitness.
“If you’re gonna start down that road of saying people are unfit for office because of a personal issue, why limit it to age?” Reuben said. “Whether a poor decision is made because of intellectual capacity, or it’s because of a disease like alcoholism, then the poor decision stands either way.”Aldwin also felt Haley was introducing a “slippery slope,” that could extend beyond presidential candidates. ”Do we start testing Supreme Court justices, mayors and governors?,” she told me.
One thing is clear: Haley is using age as a political strategy because her two biggest opponents in the race for president happen to be pretty old. If her opponents were, say, 50 years old, Haley may not have made such a bold suggestion.“This is a wonderful soundbite because it gets at her political aim, which is: separate myself from the other candidates,” said Nace.
She is also not the first politician to lean into ageism. In 2020, Trump ran television ads that claimed Biden lacked the stamina and mental fortitude to lead the country, and digital ads that said he “
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