We can check candidates aren't senile while keeping elections democratic
On reducing mental deficiency among politicians
Ronald Reagan is 73. It’s the American presidential debates of 1984, and he’s up against Walter Mondale, 56. Reagan is asked if he is too old to be president. “I will not make age an issue of this campaign,” he says. “I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”
It’s among the great lines in political history, so good that you can see Mondale laughing in the clip. It also captures Reagan’s appeal, charm and wholesomeness. He had the kind of voice you want to hear in a crisis. Or a call centre.
And yet, as his daughter Patti Davis has conceded, it would “probably be a good idea” for presidential candidates to take cognitive tests before they are handed the nuclear codes. Indeed, some of those close to Reagan believe he may have already been suffering symptoms of dementia when he was running for a second term.
That’s despite the Gipper being a youthful 77 when he left office, a year younger than Donald Trump would be if he won a second term later this year. Joe Biden will be about to celebrate his eighty-second birthday when the election happens in early November. They are super old.
Cognitive tests would therefore only confirm what people can already observe with their own eyes. Look up a video of Trump or Biden from 30 years ago, and the mental decline is evident. Just as a 35-year-old footballer isn’t as spry as when they were 20, 80-something politicians aren’t as sharp as when they were 40.
The focus on Biden’s mental decline is politically contingent, Democrats being aware that it’s become an issue for voters and a potential source of electoral defeat. On the Republican side, the unlikely presidential hopeful Nikki Haley is also using it as a cudgel to beat Trump with.
Contrary to Haley’s age-limited proposal, there’s no reason a cognitive test should only apply to the elderly – some people decline much sooner. But the trouble is that once you’ve conceded that some people may not be fit to stand for the presidency or other public offices as a matter of mental ability, it’s not obvious why cognitive decline should be the only thing you test for. And even if it was obvious, the slippery slope is a logical fallacy, not a political one.
Critics’ main charge against Biden is that his memory is failing for him. Remembering stuff is important when your entire role is to make what Jeff Bezos would describe as “a small number of high quality decisions”1. Other factors in high-quality decision-making would include general intelligence, emotional resilience and ability to handle basic logic2, a mix of intellectual and psychological talents that some people just don’t have. You could add physical health3 and some subject matter knowledge if you were so minded.
There is a risk that such tests would be too stringent, of course. Politicians should not be expected to be perfect, and the selection of them is not the same as hiring a senior exec to run a glorified online bookshop. But there’s certainly some overlap in the qualities you’d expect of business leaders and political ones, as well as of anyone running anything important.
So the main barrier to testing politicians is not in making the case that it’s sensible to have smart people in charge of the economy. The trouble is that any test you might think to apply makes our politics less democratic, as well as inviting campaigners to complain that it is discriminatory – which it would be, if not in an exclusively pejorative sense.
Any system of testing for intellectual ability would benefit people with the time, money or existing education to swot up for the exams, at a cost to those who lack such advantages. It might also hurt people with disabilities that make succeeding in those tests harder, most visibly in any considerations of physical health.
Any ban on those failing the test from running would therefore exclude some from full democratic participation. It would be a kind of property qualification for the modern era, your GCSE certificates standing in for daddy’s property portfolio.
I’ve therefore devised a cunning solution. Force the candidates to take the tests, but don’t bar anyone from standing if they flunk them. Instead publish the results for the electorate to see, and let voters make up their minds whether they want the dunce or the girly swot at the nuclear controls.
Yes, Amazon is devilish, but Bezos is right about this, and unlike other corporate psychopaths he gets enough sleep. That may be why his company is the only one that can reliably find my flat.
Two years ago the Royal Statistical Society posed a hundred MPs with the following question: if you toss a coin twice, what is the probability of getting two heads? Only half got the right answer.
Make MPs complete Takeshi’s Castle as a spin-off series and the costs of administering these tests would pay for themselves.