In the editions of The Washington Post that appeared the day after Bob Dole's seventy-third birthday on July 22, a Post editorial considered the "issue of age" in the 1996 presidential campaign. Although Dole's annual physical showed him to be, in the Post's words, "exceptionally fit," some voters were nevertheless telling pollsters that perhaps Dole was "too old for the job." Such worries, the Post observed, may in fact be reflections of Dole's "demeanor" and his social attitudes. Consequently, the paper suggested, it might be better to focus on the candidate's "cultural sensibility rather than his chronological age."
 Such a discussion would be a step forward for campaign journalism, but not many news organizations have heeded it. In the Post itself two days before, a page-one article on the results of Dole's medical check-up carried the headline dole's birthday renews age-old old-age debate. While the reporting showed Dole to be in excellent health by any standards, the article repeatedly measured his test results against less reassuring statistics of average men his age. To further emphasize chronology, the piece was followed by a nostalgic look at the quaint world of Babe Ruth and the Charleston into which he had been born, so long ago, in 1923. (In contrast, The New York Times presented a detailed and straightforward report headlined doctors call dole's health excellent.)

 Age has been a "story" on Bob Dole's non-birthday campaign days as well. Attention to Dole's physical energy, and to his abilities to perform as president, have become as much a part of the campaign coverage as the tape recorders, boom mikes, and other equipment the press corps totes along. It's a particularly irritating kind of baggage - knee-jerk, reductive, unspoken assumptions about age, behavior, and stamina. "Ageism" is not a word that comes quickly to the tongue; this campaign year, however, the subject cries for attention.

 Stereotypical attitudes about age routinely appear in coverage, putting "Old Dole" in a no-win situation. It's news when he appears full of energy in spite of his age, and it's news when he seems to be flagging or fumbling, because of his age.

 On June 1, for example, Edwin Chen, forty-seven, of the Los Angeles Times filed an upbeat story of Dole's fifteen-hour day beginning in Los Angeles and ending in Chicago; the candidate, Chen wrote, "erect as always . . . chatted easily . . . utterly committed to a full and even punishing campaign pace." But reporter Burt Solomon in the National Journal described Dole at one of the Chicago stops as "tired and poorly briefed," giving an "awkward response" to a questioner. One Dole; two captions. Or perhaps Dole at slightly different times. Either way, age and performance were the subtext.

 This fixation often produces discontinuities in what's reported and what isn't. Dole's staff, as one Washington-based reporter told cjr, "cannot afford to let it be known that he takes naps." But Clinton, the reporter adds, "is well known to be a napper, though that's not considered 'news.' "

 Sure enough, in Dole stories, we found regular references to the fact that he must catnap on the campaign plane, or take morning helicopter rides to the airport instead of motorcades, to squeeze in an extra hour's sleep. By contrast, when Todd Purdum, thirty-seven, described the Clintonian style of sleep earlier this year in The New York Times, the tone was endearing. Because Clinton naps, he is "clearly more relaxed . . . . His White House runs better, and so does he." Old Dole naps to survive; Clinton's nap-time story is, in Purdum's own words, "sweet, human, real."

 Ageism was also in evidence in the coverage of Dole's highly publicized "disastrous" appearance on NBC's Today show in early July when, in response to Katie Couric's questions about cigarettes and health, he jumped all over her, seemingly minimizing the effects of nicotine and accusing her of playing the Democrats' game. In the resulting media hoo-ha, Howard Fineman, forty-seven, described Dole in Newsweek as "a throwback to an earlier era, when World War II soldiers lived for their next Lucky Strike"; the Charleston, West Virginia, Gazette said Dole was "out of date . . . cranky" - characteristics, clearly, of Grumpy Old Men. Indeed, when New York Times columnist Frank Rich, forty-seven, wrote about the Couric encounter, the headline was "Grumpiest Old Man." A more thoughtful analysis might have pointed out that Dole's position was shaped more by his conservative ideology than by his age. Half the Republican House freshman class - a group young enough to be Dole's sons and daughters - hold the same attitudes about smoking (private behavior should not be legislated by government, even if people make bad choices). These right-thinking representatives also harbor "cranky" opinions about the liberal media. But when Texas's Steve Stockman, thirty-nine, or Idaho's Helen Chenoweth, fifty-eight, rant and rave, their style is described as "aggressive," or "in your face."

 Similarly, when covering Dole's spring vacation in Bal Harbour, Florida, reporters found it hard to resist the usual stereotypes. In his New York Times account of April 2, for example, Adam Nagourney, forty-one, felt compelled to note that at the luxury condominium where the Doles have been vacationing for the past fourteen years, there were "more people with canes or in wheelchairs than children" in the area around the pool. In The Washington Post, William Booth, thirty-seven, observed that Dole "loves to bask in the sun . . . supine and inert for hours." Nagourney drew comparisons between the sedentary Dole and such action-loving presidents as Clinton and Bush; Booth drew a comparison between Dole and, among others, JFK; neither bothered to recall Kennedy's debilitating chronic medical problems - or, for that matter, his Dr. Feelgood solutions to them.

 Even in straight accounts of routine campaign news, reporters invariably drop in the obligatory sentence, "Dole could become the oldest newly inaugurated president in American history if he wins the elections" (The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, also favored in some sixty other newspaper and magazine stories accessed through Nexis). The same database search also discloses this slight variation: "If elected, Dole would be the oldest president to take office. President Clinton will turn 50 on Aug. 19" (Lynn Sweet, forty-five, Chicago Sun-Times). The numbers are "true," but they're not the whole "truth."

 Some clock-watching is inevitable in a campaign; the candidates' birthdays, obviously, provided a natural peg for coverage of the "age issue." Dole's July 22 birthday this year fell, importantly for the campaign and the media, just before his party's convention. In mid-July, the Dole people, knowing "Dole - How Healthy?" takeouts timed to his birthday were in the works at major news organizations, leveraged that media peg by releasing the results of his annual "birthday physical" to selected news organizations (the examination was actually conducted in June).

 In July 1995, then Senator Dole had released a similarly detailed, nine-page package of medical records covering much the same information, including the names of the medicines he took. That seventy-second birthday script produced one of the enduring "Old Dole" subtexts: the photograph, taken by Tim Dillon for USA Today, of Dole on his apartment treadmill, a formal-looking fellow in a dress shirt and boxer shorts, dutifully performing his three-times-a-week routine. A year later, Newsday dug it out of the files to run with its 1996 birthday-health report. "Too Old to Be President?" asked the head over the treadmill photo. The year-old picture also showed up this May in The New York Times, splashed across three columns and down two-thirds of the front page of the Week In Review section accompanying a piece on whether the Democrats (!) were using the "age issue" against Dole.

 But while coverage of "age" is nominally pegged to what's being said by newsmakers, it's not all that clear that the subject is weighing heavily in voters' minds. The public opinion polls, in fact, send a mixed message.

 When "typical" voters in their seventies are interviewed, they say they are influenced by the way they themselves feel, physically and mentally. When CBS News did its Dole Birthday story on July 23, the first two seniors heard on camera talked about how tired and down they felt; two other seniors were more upbeat, stressing the "wisdom" that comes with years. CBS, however, had the last, dour word: as supporters sang "Happy Birthday," the voiceover intoned, "Dole's facing the music" - a wordplay suggestive of any number of bad things: facing senility, defeat, death, or just seventy-three.

 As we've read repeatedly in the "Old Dole" stories over the last six months, the average seventy-two-year-old white male has a 27 percent chance of dying in five years - a statistic that is meant to carry weight in the context of Dole's choice of running mate. But Dole, of course, is not average; he's in good shape, and seriously health-conscious as well, by the testimony of his medical records. For a time, around the release of those medical records, it looked like the campaign press had rebounded from its dim prognoses about Dole's age. A St. Louis Post-Dispatch piece, for example, quoted Dole in the lead: "I feel about fifty-five." Newsweek's August 19 chart comparing the vital medical statistics on Dole and Clinton "In Shape for the Big Run?") concluded that Dole "may qualify for Medicare but his stats suggest he has the body of a sixty-one-year-old." (Clinton's physiological age was forty-seven.) And the Washington Post birthday story took note of the new geriatric realities. "A generation ago, somebody doing well over the age of sixty-five would have been seen as exceptional," a gerontologist was quoted as saying. "Not so today. What is developing . . . is a separation of the young old from the old old, meaning those over eighty-five."
 That doesn't sound like too subtle an idea for campaign '96 to grasp. But don't count on it. If "Old Dole" wants to get elected, he'd better not get a head cold, act cranky, miss a campaign event, or look seventy-three.

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