No joke: Trump will be oldest first-term president -- Jan. 5, 2017 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Vice President Joe Biden quickened the pulse of some Democrats last month when he said he may run for president. In four years, he’ll be 78. Was he serious?

Die-hard Bernie Sanders fans want to believe he still has a shot at the White House. In 2020, Sanders will be 79.

In comparison, Elizabeth Warren, another Democratic presidential possibility, is a youngster. She’ll be a mere 71 in four years.

Donald J. Trump enters the Oval Office at threescore years and 10, the age Mark Twain at his own 70^th birthday party called the “Scriptural statute of limitations.”

Months older than Ronald Reagan at his first inauguration, Trump will be the oldest first-term president in history.

Most Americans don’t remember that even younger presidents have had serious health problems. Woodrow Wilson was 63 when he suffered a debilitating stroke in 1919 and was gravely ill for the last year and a half of his term.

Dwight Eisenhower was 65 when he had a massive heart attack in Denver in 1955 and spent seven weeks in the hospital there. The White House kept the public in the dark about the severity of both cases. Eisenhower recovered and won a second term.

Age was hardly mentioned during the last campaign, which offered voters a choice between grandparents. Grandpa Trump is a year older than Grandma Hillary Clinton, but he gibed that she lacked the stamina to be president.

Clinton and Trump released letters from their doctors attesting to their health, with Clinton providing more details. Neither went as far as GOP presidential nominee John McCain in 2008. To reassure voters about his physical fitness, McCain, then 71, released more than a thousand pages of medical records.

While Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, is 57, most of Trump’s Cabinet picks are white males over 60, reflecting the growing trend of working later in life. Nearly 20 percent of Americans over 65 hold full or part-time jobs, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported last year.

The Oval Office, though, has traditionally been a place for the middle-aged. The average age of presidents at their first inauguration is 55. John F. Kennedy was inaugurated at 43, Bill Clinton at 46 and Barack Obama, 47. Theodore Roosevelt became the youngest president at 42, after the assassination of William McKinley.

When World War II hero Bob Dole ran for president in 1996, he had to put up with late-night jokes about his age – 72.

“Bob Dole is calling himself an optimist,” David Letterman said in a monologue. “I understand this because a lot of people would look at a glass as half empty. Bob Dole looks at the glass and says, `What a great place to put my teeth.’” Dole lost to the decades-younger Clinton.

Perhaps the all-time master at obliterating the age issue was Ronald Reagan. In 1984, Reagan, 73, was running for a second term against Democrat Walter Mondale, a lad of 56. Asked during a presidential debate if he was up for another four years, the Gipper was ready.

“I’m not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience,” Reagan quipped, putting away the age issue, at least through the election.

Reagan, who survived being shot and colon cancer as president, even dared to tell self-deprecating age jokes.

“One of my favorite quotations about age comes from Thomas Jefferson. He said that we should never judge a president by his age, only by his work. And ever since he told me that, I’ve stopped worrying,” Reagan told the National Alliance for Senior Citizens in 1984.

“When I go in for a physical now, they no longer ask me how old I am. They just carbon-date me,” he said at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 1987.

It was easy for Reagan to joke about getting older when he was often seen riding horses and clearing brush at his California ranch. He wasn’t diagnosed with Alzheimer’s until several years after he left office.

So far, Trump – who boasts about his vigor and has a glamorous, 46-year-old wife -- has managed to avoid age jokes. We’ll see whether his age becomes a punch line in four years when he’s 74.

©2017 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

A gracious loser? We can hope -- Nov 3, 2016 column

By MARSHA MERCER

A ritual of American politics will unfold Tuesday night.

Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will hold victory parties but, before the night is over, one will concede defeat. If we’re lucky.

We can take nothing for granted. To the end, Trump remains a question mark. In his last debate with Clinton, he refused to say whether he would accept the results of the election.

“I will keep you in suspense,” he said. It was outrageous, provocative and pure Trump. He still appears likely to come up short in the Electoral College, although polls have tightened in the last week.

One thing is certain, though. The American people have suffered enough disappointment during this dispiriting campaign. Barring an election disaster, the loser needs to accept the will of the voters with grace and urge his or her followers to do the same.

The winner also must move immediately to begin repairing the breach that has riven the country.

This presidential contest has always been more about the candidates’ deficiencies than their policies. When the votes are finally counted, it’s time for all of us to put the country first.

Our admirable American tradition holds that defeated presidential candidates rise to the occasion for the sake of the greater good. It’s reassuring to see failed candidates muster grace – and even humor -- at a time of personal misery.

In 1908, after his third failed campaign for the White House, Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan said: “I am reminded of the drunk who, when he had been thrown down the stairs of the club for the third time, gathered himself up, and said, `I am on to those people. They don’t want me in there,’” William Safire wrote in “Safire’s New Political Dictionary.”

Going into the 1948 election, Thomas Dewey was confident he’d beat Harry Truman – as were some newspaper editors. We’ve all seen the screaming banner headline in the Chicago Daily Tribune, “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.”

All night the votes came in. When Dewey awoke the next morning to learn he’d lost, he sent a gracious telegram to Truman.

“My heartiest congratulations to you on your election and every good wish for a successful administration. I urge all Americans to unite behind you in support of every effort to keep our nation strong and free and establish peace in the world,” he wrote.

Asked by reporters what had happened, Dewey replied, “I was just as surprised as you are . . . It has been grand fun, boys and girls. I enjoyed it immensely.”

Four years later, when he lost to Dwight Eisenhower, Democrat Adlai Stevenson said he was reminded of the story about Abraham Lincoln after an election defeat. Lincoln said he felt like the boy who stubbed his foot in the dark -- “too old to cry, but it hurt too much to laugh.”

After the bitter 1960 presidential campaign, Richard Nixon offered a quasi-concession statement to John F. Kennedy.

“If the present trend continues, Mister Kennedy, Senator Kennedy, will be the next president of the United States,” Nixon told his supporters in California about midnight Pacific time. 

“I want Senator Kennedy to know . . . that certainly if this trend does continue, and he does become our next president, that he will have my wholehearted support and yours too,” Nixon said.

Nixon was convinced voter fraud cost him the election but he did not demand a recount despite JFK’s razor-thin margin of victory -- just over 100,000 votes out of 68 million votes cast. 

Kennedy won 303 electoral votes and Nixon 219. Fifteen unpledged electors in Alabama, Mississippi and Oklahoma voted for segregationist Sen. Harry Byrd of Virginia.

To preserve his viability for future elections, Nixon would not look like a sore loser.

Nobody ever warms to defeat. Mitt Romney was so sure he was going to win four years ago that he’d written only a victory speech.

“It’s about 1,118 words long,” he told reporters traveling with him on Election Day. His staff hadn’t written a concession speech either.

A few hours later, Romney called President Barack Obama to congratulate him. Then Romney went to what was supposed to be his victory party.

After wishing the president and his family well, Romney told supporters, “This is a time of great challenges for America and I pray that the president will be successful in guiding our nation.”

We can dream that whoever loses on Tuesday is as classy.

(c) 2016 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Everything you need to know about vetoes -- Feb. 5, 2015 column

By MARSHA MERCER

The vetoes are coming. The House plans to vote next week on a Senate-passed bill approving construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, and that likely will give President Barack Obama his first chance this year to use his veto pen.

After vetoing just two bills in six years, Obama already has threatened to reject at least 10 bills contemplated or under consideration by the Republican-controlled Congress.

That may sound impressive, but Obama is a veto piker compared with Grover Cleveland, the so-called king of vetoes. In his eight years as president, Cleveland wielded his veto authority 584 times.

But Cleveland takes second in total numbers to Franklin D. Roosevelt. In his 12 years in the Oval Office, FDR had 635 vetoes – and he had Democratic congresses his entire tenure.

As we haven’t seen any vetoes since 2010, here’s a quick refresher on what Woodrow Wilson (44 vetoes) called a president’s “most formidable prerogative.”

The word veto comes from the Latin “I forbid” and refers to the president’s power to disapprove a bill and prevent its becoming law. The word veto doesn’t appear in the Constitution, but the framers put the power in Article 1, Section 7 as a check on the legislative process.

A president has 10 days, excluding Sundays, to sign a bill passed by Congress for it to become law. With a regular veto, the president returns the bill to the chamber where it originated, usually with an explanation of his objections. Overriding a veto requires a two-thirds vote in both the Senate and the House.

If Congress adjourns during the 10 days, the president can’t return the bill. His decision to withhold his signature is a pocket veto, and Congress does not have the opportunity to override.

Since 1789, when the federal government was founded, 37 of the 44 presidents have used their veto power. In all there have been 2,564 vetoes -- 1,498 regular and 1,066 pocket.

The last president to serve two terms without a single veto? Thomas Jefferson.

Congress has overridden just 4 percent of vetoes, the Congressional Research Service reports, but the hurdle to overcoming a president’s objections has dropped in recent decades. Since John F. Kennedy took office in 1961, Congress has overridden 16 percent of vetoes.  

Democrats controlled both houses of Congress when Obama wielded his veto pen in 2009 and 2010, and neither veto was overridden.

You won’t be surprised that both veto threats and vetoes occur more often when the president and Congress are of different parties. Threats help the president shape legislation because the party in power knows it will need the support of two-thirds of the Congress to make law stick over a president’s disapproval.

“For highly consequential legislation drafted during divided party government, it is hardly an exaggeration to say the president keeps up a veritable drum-beat of veto threats,” Princeton University professor Charles M. Cameron wrote in an essay on “The Presidential Veto” published in 2009.

The vast majority of vetoes are inconsequential in that they have little public policy effect, he says. Congress has attempted to override about 80 percent of consequential vetoes during divided party government, with a success rate of 45 percent, adds Cameron, who is the author of the 2000 book “Veto Bargaining: Presidents and the Politics of Negative Power.” 

Democrat Cleveland had a Democratic Congress for only two of his eight years as president. Of his 346 regular vetoes and 238 pocket vetoes, only seven were overridden. Most of the regular vetoes in his first term disallowed bills to grant veterans benefits to people who didn’t qualify. Even considering their symbolic value, though, “Cleveland’s vetoes…didn’t amount to much,” Cameron writes.

George W. Bush was the first president since John Quincy Adams to serve a full term without a veto, but that was in the post-9/11 era when Congress was more deferential. Bush issued 12 vetoes in his second term – 11 when Democrats controlled the Senate and House – and four were overridden.

Dwight Eisenhower used the veto to force compromise with Democratic activists, and Bill Clinton forced House Republicans led by Newt Gingrich to moderate, says Cameron.   

So as the vetoes come once again, we’ll see if Obama can use his leverage to force this Republican Congress to moderate its demands.  

©2015 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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