Youth shouldn't be served

No matter who wins this presidential race, somebody far too young is going to have a hand too close to the nuclear button, the economy toggle and the dial that I imagine sends hurricanes toward Cuba.

Barack Obama turned 47 last month. Sarah Palin is a child by comparison; she doesn't turn 45 until a few weeks after the inauguration.

Either way, they're both too young to have any meaningful role in the governance of the United States of America. Take it from a guy whose birthday falls between theirs and who often feels like a newspaper column is way too much responsibility.

Presidents are supposed to be gray-haired eminences, grizzled with experience and hard-won wisdom. They're supposed to know important things, secret things learned through years of toil and decades of sage advice from smart people who live in paneled libraries and consume leather-bound books.

They're not supposed to be the kid down the street who you made eat paste back in 1968.

A similar age requirement should hold for all kinds of professions. This isn't just a selfish hope for some competence and clarity of thought in the White House, though heaven knows we need some of that. It's to save us all from embarrassment.

The first time you find yourself in a doctor's office explaining an itch to a woman who was in grade school while you were in college, you confront your mortality in several humbling - not to mention mortifying - ways. And nothing reminds you of the march of years like watching TV news delivered by somebody who only remembers Richard Nixon as a punch line.

So certainly nobody should have to live in a country led by a person barely old enough to qualify for the office. (I know: Obama is running for president, Palin for vice president. But you'd have a hard time knowing that either has a running mate at the moment.)

They are both mighty accomplished politicians and people, the kind who have aimed for the White House since they were in diapers. And don't get me wrong; people my age are fine for some things. Mostly, I mean things with no sharp edges.

A guy from my class at William and Mary runs the best news show in America, one that masquerades as a snarky TV program on a silly network called Comedy Central. Another edits a big-deal magazine, or used to. One even ran the FCC for a while.

But I know these people. Like me, you don't want them to have the keys to anything important.

People my age, and I know I speak for all of us, are far too bewildered by the graying of our hair and the wrinkling of our eyes to actually concentrate on the national security adviser when he's explaining the difference between South Ossetia and Abkhazia, or why Vladimir Putin has changed his name to Leonid Brezhnev.

Inexplicably, though, our system of democracy doesn't even attempt to prevent anyone my age from setting foot in the White House, except on a tour. The Constitution - and this is only one of its many shortcomings - insists only that a president be a "natural born" citizen at least 35 years old who has lived in the states for 14 years.

Aside from the obvious - did they have caesareans in 1787, and why 14 years? - nowhere does the Constitution say that a president must be older than I am. Specifically me, and by at least a decade.

This would be a very good idea for the next amendment, instead of wasting the nation's time and energy on things like global warming or gay marriage or interstate commerce. Take it from somebody who knows precisely how inadequate 45 years of life experience is - the nation is probably best served when people like me are kept as far away as possible from actual power.

Then again, after the sundry debacles of the past 16 years, brought to us by presidents supposedly older and wiser, perhaps youth and inexperience - not to mention a birthday in the 1960s - are precisely what the White House needs.

Donald Luzzatto is an editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot. E-mail him at donald.luzzatto@pilotonline.com.