John McCain will turn 72 in August, and if elected, would be the oldest chief executive inaugurated to a first term. (Reagan was just shy of his 70th birthday when he first entered the White House.) Early indications are that the Arizona senator’s age already is an issue for many voters: About a third of voters surveyed by the independent Pew Research Center in February said that age 71 is “too old to be president.” That’s about the same proportion that judged 73-year-old Republican nominee Bob Dole too old in 1996.
In a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll taken in March, voters were significantly more likely to say that Americans are “ready to elect” an African American or a woman as president than a person over age 70. That’s important, says Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Center, because it shows that people worry about the competence of an older person. “They’re very frank about it,” he says.
But the flip side of the age issue is the experience issue, and if McCain had his way, that would be a dominant theme in a contest against Obama, McCain’s campaign aides say. Obama, a first-term U.S. senator from Illinois, was elected in 2004. His resumé includes eight years in the state Senate, several years as a civil rights lawyer and several more as a community organizer in Chicago.
McCain’s 25 years in Congress—first in the House and now in the Senate—and his career as a naval aviator, and the well-known story of his years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, make the two candidates’ biographies a study in contrasts.
Research on how older people make decisions shows that experience can compensate for declining cognitive skills, says psychologist Ellen Peters, senior research scientist with Decision Research, a nonprofit institute based in Eugene, Ore. It’s true that memory and speed in processing information begin to decline in one’s 20s, Peters says, which can hamper an older person’s decision making, especially in an unfamilar situation.
But experience, along with world knowledge that accumulates with age, “compensates for the loss of deliberative capacity,” Peters says.
Besides mental acuity, an older candidate’s health—or the possibility that a president will become ill in office—can present concerns. McCain will soon cross the 75-year threshold often used to separate “young-old” age from “old-old.” And the candidate underwent surgery for skin cancer in 2000, though medical experts say his prospects appear favorable.
But the health issue is “really more a matter of function,” says Robert Butler, M.D., founder of the International Longevity Center-U.S.A. “In the instance of McCain, he’s had a heck of a campaign. He had an amazing amount of energy and capability as far as I could see.”
Perhaps we should see a Presidential Candidate as an individual and not in terms of age. 
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