The Boston Globe has a multimedia feature showing how recent presidents have aged during their terms. Judging from the graying of George W. Bush since 2000, he has felt the pressures of the presidency, too. And Barack Obama had better beware (and stop smoking). “It doesn’t matter if they’re Democrats or Republicans, it doesn’t matter if they’ve been athletes or not beforehand, it doesn’t matter if they were smokers or not. For eight years in office, they age 16 years,” said Cleveland Clinic chief wellness officer Michael Roizen, who has studied how presidents since Theodore Roosevelt have aged.
Similarly, Northeastern University political scientist Robert E. Gilbert said that 25 of 36 presidents from Washington to Nixon died earlier than life expectancy data would have predicted.
But said Leo Cooney, chief of geriatrics at Yale School of Medicine, said “it’s true that when people have the weight of the world on their shoulders, they may get more wrinkles. But the data that this impacts their health is not there.”
The remarks by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., that have received the most attention from Sunday’s “Meet the Press” appearance concerned whether Roland Burris would be seated as a senator from Illinois (maybe) and whether Reid told Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich not to pick an African-American to replace Barack Obama (”He is making all this up,” Reid said). But Reid’s dancing was fanciest when asked about his April 2007 comment that the “war is lost and that the surge is not accomplishing anything” in Iraq. Reid tried to claim Sunday that what he really meant was what Gen. David Petraeus was saying at the time: that the war could not be won militarily. Reid added: “I said it differently than he did. But it needed a change in direction. Petraeus brought that about. He brought it about – the surge helped, of course it helped. But in addition to that, the urging of me and other people in Congress and the country dictated a change, and that took place.”
“Our financial catastrophe, like Bernard Madoff’s pyramid scheme, required all sorts of important, plugged-in people to sacrifice our collective long-term interests for short-term gain,” author Michael Lewis and David Einhorn, a hedge fund president, wrote in a commentary. These people, companies and agencies are supposed to apply pressure from outside the market to consider the longer term. But that’s the problem, they wrote: “The tyranny of the short term has extended itself with frightening ease into the entities that were meant to, one way or another, discipline Wall Street, and force it to consider its enlightened self-interest.”
Most cash-strapped states have expected that any federal help they get through the stimulus package would take the form of a grant. But on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., touted loaning the money instead. “I think nobody thinks we ought to be spending this money on things like Mob museums and waterslides,” McConnell said. “And if the money were lent rather than just granted, states would, I think, spend it wisely, and the states that didn’t need it at all wouldn’t take any.” But some states that need the money but can’t afford more debt wouldn’t take any either, defeating the purpose.
The Boston Globe has a multimedia feature showing how recent presidents have aged during their terms. Judging from the graying of George W. Bush since 2000, he has felt the pressures of the presidency, too. And Barack Obama had better beware (and stop smoking). “It doesn’t matter if they’re Democrats or Republicans, it doesn’t matter if they’ve been athletes or not beforehand, it doesn’t matter if they were smokers or not. For eight years in office, they age 16 years,” said Cleveland Clinic chief wellness officer Michael Roizen, who has studied how presidents since Theodore Roosevelt have aged.
