McCain and the Politics of Mortality

Since John McCain announced Friday that first-term Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin would be his running mate, Democrats have been quick to point out that the 44-year-old governor could soon be just “a heartbeat away from the presidency.” The veiled reference to McCain’s advanced age is hard to miss.

It’s a macabre point to raise on the night when Palin will speak to the convention here — but a look at the actuarial tables insurance companies use to evaluate customers shows that it’s not an irrelevant one. According to these statistics, there is a roughly 1 in 3 chance that a 72-year-old man will not reach the age of 80, which is how old McCain would be at the end of a second presidential term. And that doesn’t factor in individual medical history, such as McCain’s battles with potentially lethal skin cancer.

“For a man, that’s above the expected lifetime at the present,” said Michael Powers, a professor of risk management and insurance at Temple University’s Fox School of Business. The odds of a 72-year-old man living four more years, or one full White House term, are better. But for a man who has lived 72 years and 67 days (McCain’s age on Election Day this year), there is between a 14.2 and 15.1 percent chance of dying before Inauguration Day 2013, according to the Social Security Administration’s 2004 actuarial tables and the authoritative 2001 mortality statistics assembled by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.

Going by the Social Security Administration’s tables, that’s nearly ten times the likelihood that a man aged 47 years and 92 days (Barack Obama’s age on Election Day this year) will die before Jan. 20, 2013. Using the NAIC tables instead, which factor in the fact that Obama has been a smoker for most of his adult life, a non-smoker McCain’s age is still six times as likely to die in the next four years as a smoker Obama’s age. Actuaries are quick to point out that mortality statistics describe broad population trends. They insist the models can’t necessarily be applied to individual people.

“Actuarial models are good for estimating the average future lifetime of, say, 100,000 50-year-olds, or how many out of 100,000 50-year-olds will survive to 60, but are lousy at estimating about one particular 50-year-old,” explained Jim Daniel, a professor of actuarial studies at the University of Texas. The odds, then, that McCain will reach the age of 76 or 80 may be considerably higher than in the population at large.

Jack Luff, an actuary with the Society of Actuaries, also notes that the NAIC statistics are slightly weighted toward a higher probability of death. “The [Commissioners Standard Ordinary] table is directed at life insurance and does have a margin in it with respect to extra deaths for financial reporting purposes,” said Luff. The same calculations made by utilizing an annuity table, which is used for the purposes of disbursing pensions and tends to predict slightly greater longevity, suggest that a man McCain’s age has a marginally reduced one in ten chance of not reaching age 76.

Still, the quarter-century age gap between Obama and McCain is the widest ever between major-party presidential candidates. And no matter what table is applied, the difference in average mortality rates of men McCain’s age and men Obama’s age is enormous.

According to the Social Security Administration, there is a roughly 1.6 percent chance that a man Obama’s age would die before completing one term in the White House. Even factoring in Obama’s cigarette usage, there is, on average, still only a 2.4 percent chance of death between Election Day this year and Jan. 20, 2013, according to the NAIC. And since the actuarial risks of cigarette smoking are believed to wear off over time and Obama has not suffered from lung cancer in the past, the Democrat’s long-term odds could be closer to those of a non-smoker, according to several actuaries.

Powers observed that these statistics would be incomplete without factoring in the two men’s full medical histories, adding: “McCain’s expected age of death is probably higher than Obama’s because he’s already lived to the age of 72.” But for voters, the most important question is how well the candidates are likely to fare during one or two terms in office.

With Obama and McCain, it’s not clear that factoring in outside medical information would make the comparison any more flattering to the presumptive Republican nominee. “It’s not just a matter of McCain being age 72,” said Lois Horwitz of Boston University’s department of mathematics and statistics. “It has to do with, of course, the underwriting characteristics of their lives.” Actuaries say different insurance companies might factor in McCain’s history of cancer differently, but that in any case it probably wouldn’t help the Republican candidate’s odds. “If they have a known condition they’re going to be looked at very carefully,” Luff explained. With melanoma, he said, “they’d probably look for five years with no recurrence.”

“My understanding is that with even the worst forms of skin cancer, if they’re caught early the lethality is not that great,” said Powers, who added: “The risk associated with that lesion would probably have more to do with the probability of having future lesions.”

Plus, Powers noted, serving four or eight years in the White House could wear down the presidential candidates even beyond what actuarial statistics would predict. “Probably, there is a substantial effect associated with being in an office like the presidency,” said Powers. “I think people do believe it tends to age you rather quickly.” McCain has acknowledged in the past that his advanced age would be a factor in the presidential campaign, particularly when it came to choosing a running mate.

In April, the Arizona senator told radio host Don Imus: “I’m aware of [the] enhanced importance of this issue given my age.” As early as 2007 there was speculation that McCain might pledge to serve just one term, in light of his advanced years. McCain ruled out that possibility in an Aug. 20 interview with Politico, saying simply: “I’m not considering it.” The McCain campaign has pushed back hard on any traces of ageism coming from the candidate’s critics, accusing Obama of age discrimination in May when the Illinois senator responded to a McCain statement by saying the Republican was “losing his bearings.”

During the Republican primaries, actor Chuck Norris also cited McCain’s age as a factor in his own decision to support former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. “That’s why I didn’t pick John to support, because I’m just afraid the vice president will wind up taking over his job within that four-year presidency,” Norris explained in January.

Should people consider age when deciding who to vote for?

I Wish I Were Qualified!

Mounting a ferocious defense of his embattled running mate, John McCain said he is buying a TV ad arguing that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has more experience than the Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama. In an effort to rev up conservatives, a campaign statement issued a list of critical media mentions that it called “smears” of Palin, who speaks in primetime at the convention on Wednesday night.

The campaign announced: “The McCain campaign will launch a television ad directly comparing Gov. Palin’s executive experience as a governor who oversees 24,000 state employees, 14 statewide cabinet agencies and a $ 10 billion budget to Barack Obama’s experience as a one-term junior senator from Illinois.” The ad is what the campaign calls “a forward-leaning effort to counter the shameless smears that have prevailed during Gov. Palin’s introduction to the American voter.”

Senior adviser Steve Schmidt gave Politico a statement saying the campaign will have no more comment about the vetting process, which was the subject of more critical coverage in Wednesday morning's papers:
“Gov. Sarah Palin is an exceptional governor with a record of accomplishment that exceeds, by far, the governing accomplishments of Sen. Obama. Her selection came after a six-month long rigorous vetting process where her extraordinary credentials and exceptionalism became clear. This vetting controversy is a faux media scandal designed to destroy the first female Republican nominee for vice president of the United States who has never been a part of the old boys' network that has come to dominate the news establishment in this country. Sen. McCain picked his governing partner after a long and thorough search. Gov. Palin looks forward to addressing the nation and laying out the fundamental choice this election represents for the American people. "

The McCain campaign will have no further comment about our long and thorough process. This nonsense is over. It is time to begin the debate about how to win the two wars this country is engaged in,how to make this country energy independent and how to create jobs for American families that are hurting. The American people get to do the vetting now on Election Day — Nov. 4."

Other than the qualifications spelled out in the Constitution, what sort of qualifications do you want the President...or Vice President to have.

High SAT scores?

Married?

Good looking?

Can put 37 cheese balls in mouth at one time?

Getting to Know You

Fishing permit violations. A blue-collar husband who racked up a DUI citation as a 22-year-old. An unmarried teenage daughter who is pregnant and a nasty child custody battle involving a family member. All of this, to one degree or another, has surfaced in recent days as a result of efforts to discredit or undermine Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. But these revelations may have the opposite effect: In one sense, they could reinforce how remarkably unremarkable she is.

So far — and it is hard to tell what the future may hold for Palin’s unexpected national candidacy — the travails of the Palin family probably seem awfully familiar to many average Americans. It is this averageness that makes her such a politically promising running mate for John McCain — and such a dangerous opponent for Democrats. Many voters will find it easy to identify with her family’s struggles — a significant advantage in an election where the voting calculus is so unusually and intensely personal.

Democrats Barack Obama and Joe Biden hardly come from blue-blood backgrounds; Biden, now famously, is an Irish-Catholic son of Scranton, Pa., and Obama was raised by a single mother. But the fact that Palin, even as a governor, remains grounded in a recognizable American lifestyle — warts and all — has not gone unnoticed among Republicans, as the first wave of opposition research has been unloaded on her.

“Authenticity is the most important characteristic for someone seeking public office,” said Nick Ayers, executive director of the Republican Governors Association. “Any news that comes out about her is not going to hurt her because it reinforces the point that she is authentically one of us.” Unlike running mates from both parties, dating back decades, the Palin family isn't part of the moneyed elite or the governing class.

Neither wife nor husband is the scion of a well-connected family. Sarah Palin attended a state school, and her brushes with the law are of the same nettlesome kind that drive recreational fishermen crazy in all 50 states. “Look at the nature of this: small-town mayor, marrying the high school sweetheart — these are the kinds of things you’d see in a Budweiser commercial as opposed to an Amstel Light commercial,” said South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford. “She wasn’t born of political pedigree, and people like that.”

Even the governor’s own Trooper-gate scandal, in which Palin is alleged to have exerted undue pressure to fire a state trooper, is suffused with an element that many families can identify with: one sister stepping in on behalf of another in an acrimonious dispute with a brother-in-law.

Powerful media organizations are beginning to pour resources into this story, so much more damaging twists and turns may await. But assuming the accusations don’t grow more serious, it is of a considerably different nature as an abuse of power than the last Trooper-gate scandal to rock the political world — the one in which Bill Clinton was alleged to use his state troopers in Arkansas to procure women as sex partners. That wouldn’t excuse Palin’s actions, of course, but it would frame them in such a way that could limit the political damage.


“The media doesn’t understand life membership in the NRA; they don’t understand getting up at 3 a.m. to hunt a moose; they don’t understand eating a mooseburger; they don’t understand being married to a guy who likes to snowmobile for fun. I am not surprised that they don’t get it. But Americans get it,” said Florida Rep. Adam Putnam. “A mooseburger means she is like one of us. She is not some jackass who’s ‘gone Washington.’”

With a pregnant teenage daughter and an infant with Down syndrome, the Palins, it seems, have been caught up in the same struggles of everyday life that confront many American families. And it poses a difficult challenge for Democrats because she will be juxtaposed against Biden, a United States senator with 35 years of experience.

Biden has his own compelling narrative; he commuted back to Wilmington, Del., daily for years to be with his young sons after his wife and infant daughter died in an automobile accident. But it is revealing that the first round of tough stories after his nomination explored conflicts of interest between Biden family members and one of the nation’s biggest asbestos litigation law firms.

That’s a long way from fishing license violations. If Palin can withstand more media vetting — a big if — and if she can avoid being framed as a nutty, gun-toting, Bible-thumper — another big if — it will suddenly become clear that there is no playbook for how to contend with a national politician who hasn’t been in the public arena long enough to accumulate the kind of personal and ethical baggage that almost invariably accompanies the ascent to power.

The recently dialed-down Democratic response to Palin’s nomination is an indicator that the Obama campaign is beginning to understand what it’s up against. At a press availability Monday in Monroe, Mich., Obama strongly distanced himself from personal attacks on Palin. “I have said before, and I will repeat again: People's families are off-limits," Obama said. "And people's children are especially off-limits. This shouldn't be part of our politics. It has no relevance to Gov. Palin's performance as a governor or her potential performance as a vice president. So I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories. You know, my mother had me when she was 18, and how a family deals with issues and teenage children, that shouldn’t be a topic of our politics."

Obama also firmly insisted that his campaign was not responsible for the proliferation of rumors about Palin’s family in the liberal blogosphere: "I am offended by that statement. There is no evidence at all that any of this involved us," he said. "Our people were not involved in any way in this, and they will not be. And if I thought there was somebody in my campaign who was involved in something like that, they would be fired."

Will these new details help or hurt the GOP?

Our Great Political Theatre

Red-meat partisan rhetoric from prominent politicians. A keynote speech to stir the party faithful. Red, white and blue balloons dropping down to frame the newly crowned nominees and their beaming families. These are the staples of modern political convention — but they’re not really necessary to officially nominate a president. Given that some or all of these familiar rituals may fall by the wayside this week as Republicans continue to calibrate their convention’s tone in the wake of Monday’s landfall of Hurricane Gustav, it’s worth exploring what work a national political convention actually has to accomplish.

The list is quite compact and includes adopting a party platform and operating rules and formally nominating the party’s nominee for the general election — actions that are necessary to trigger the presidential campaign’s eligibility for public money and get the nominee’s name on some state ballots. The rest of the usual convention stagecraft — acceptance speeches, keynote addresses and even the traditional roll call vote — are optional bits of political theater. “There is no rule that there has to be an acceptance speech. That’s the whole purpose behind the primary system,” said Brad Blakeman, who ran the 1988 GOP convention in New Orleans for nominee George H.W. Bush.

The party platform and operating rules are not among the sexier aspects of a convention, but they are among the few concrete actions that are actually required. The convention must be officially called to order, the presidential ticket nominated — though not necessarily by a roll-call vote — and the party meeting must be called to a close. There’s not much else that really has to happen. “Just like corporations must have board meetings from time to time, so must the party,” Blakeman said. “Every four years, the rules have to be ratified or technically, legally, you’re out of business.” The bulk of this business was taken care of in Monday’s truncated session.

Convention speeches by John McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin continue to be moving targets, depending on the damage along the Gulf Coast. Convention planners said Monday, however, that they now expect McCain to accept the nomination in St. Paul and that the gathering may be able to largely get back on schedule.

For McCain, the timing of his official acceptance is no mere technicality, because almost as soon as he becomes the nominee, his publicly financed campaign money kicks in — in this case $84 million, the maximum he can use through the general election Nov. 4. If McCain accepted the nomination early he would have to make the money stretch further — no small consideration since he has reportedly raked in $10 million since announcing Palin as his vice presidential running mate. “They’d like to have three more days using the private money, which is, I’m sure, how they budgeted it,” said Brad Smith, a former Federal Election Commission chairman.

Traditionally, after a nomination becomes official on the Thursday night of a convention, Smith said, on Friday morning a representative of the campaign would walk into the FEC with paperwork. The FEC would then notify the Treasury Department, which would cut the public financing check to the campaign, or transfer the money electronically. In some cases, state laws require official notification from the party upon nomination, which Republican National Committee Chairman Mike Duncan said the party will have ready to go whenever McCain officially becomes the GOP nominee. “I have several state laws that I must comply with by Thursday,” Duncan said. “I see no problem whatsoever. We’ll get it all done by then.”

In fact, presidential candidates have accepted party nominations in person only for the past 76 years or so. Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke to convention delegates in Chicago in 1932 when he became his party’s nominee. Previously, candidates were officially notified after conventions ended, sometimes not until weeks later.

Sins of Our Daughters?

Besieged by blog rumors about her 17-year-old daughter, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin — named Friday as running mate of John McCain — released a statement Monday saying her daughter is pregnant and plans to marry the father. The governor and her husband, Todd, said their daughter Bristol plans to keep the baby. "Our beautiful daughter Bristol came to us with news that, as parents, we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned," the Palins said in the statement.

"As Bristol faces the responsibilities of adulthood, she knows she has our unconditional love and support." Liberal bloggers have drawn the ire of the McCain campaign for speculating extensively about the possibility that Palin's fifth child, born this spring, was actually her daughter's. Bristol Palin is said to be five months pregnant; Sarah Palin's youngest child, Trig, was born on April 18.

Palin's presence on the ticket has thrilled evangelical conservatives — many of whom are strongly opposed to premarital sex. But Palin also is revered by the conservative base for her fierce opposition to abortion and the decision to keep an unplanned baby likely will only bolster those credentials.

The Palins have five children: sons Track (19) and Trig (four months) and daughters Bristol (17), Willow (14) and Piper (7).

The statement from Sarah and Todd Palin:

"We have been blessed with five wonderful children who we love with all our heart and mean everything to us. Our beautiful daughter Bristol came to us with news that, as parents, we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned. We’re proud of Bristol’s decision to have her baby and even prouder to become grandparents. As Bristol faces the responsibilities of adulthood, she knows she has our unconditional love and support.

"Bristol and the young man she will marry are going to realize very quickly the difficulties of raising a child, which is why they will have the love and support of our entire family. We ask the media to respect our daughter and Levi’s privacy as has always been the tradition of children of candidates."

At a press availability in Monroe, Mich., Barack Obama said: "Back off these kinds of stories."

"I have said before, and I will repeat again: People's families are off-limits," Obama said. "And people's children are especially off-limits. This shouldn't be part of our politics. It has no relevance to Gov. Palin's performance as a governor or her potential performance as a vice president. So I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories. You know my mother had me when she was 18, and how a family deals with issues and teenage children, that shouldn’t be a topic of our politics."

On charges that his campaign has stoked the story via liberal blogs: "I am offended by that statement. There is no evidence at all that any of this involved us," he said. "Our people were not involved in any way in this, and they will not be. And if I thought there was somebody in my campaign who was involved in something like that, they would be fired."

So...do you believe that families of the candidates should be off limits? Why or why not?

Political Wrath?

In an abrupt shift of tone, Barack Obama nixed his stump speech Monday and replaced it with a plea to his supporters to assist Gulf Coast residents who fled Hurricane Gustav.

“I had come here planning to talk about the contributions of the American worker,” Obama said at a Labor Day rally here, explaining the switch of plans. “My main goal today is to ask you to help. … I want everybody to remember there is a time for us to argue politics, but there is a time for us to come together as Americans.”

A day earlier, Obama was still ripping into Republican John McCain on the campaign trail. As late as Sunday night, in Battle Creek, Mich., Obama was giving his usual stump speech that includes digs at his rival.

The Republican National Committee, which had spent the day scaling back its convention schedule, quickly criticized Obama: “It’s unfortunate that Barack Obama is continuing to put politics first and attack John McCain and Sarah Palin. If a natural disaster is not enough to convince Obama to ease off the political attacks, then what is?”

The hurricane has forced the campaigns to weigh the political ramifications of natural disasters and to consider the appearances of remaining in full campaign mode while the Gulf Coast storm forces almost 2 million people to evacuate.Obama aides said the senator decided overnight to switch gears. He is keeping a full schedule Monday in Michigan and Wisconsin. But at each stop, he will ask supporters to contribute to the American Red Cross and other aid organizations.

At the rally here, he spoke for less than 10 minutes, about a quarter of the time he usually spends on stage. “Today is not a day for political speeches,” Obama said. Obama's campaign has been diligent about updating the press on his conversations with Louisiana and federal officials. He added another name to the list Monday: Herbie Johnson, deputy director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

"Sen. Obama was told that evacuation efforts are going well, although officials are still concerned about flooding and will not know the exact extent of the damage for several more hours," the campaign said in a statement.

So how do you think that a natural disaster like this will help or hurt either party?

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