The Maverick Tribe

I know I'm in the minority in saying this, but isn't there something a little lurid and crass about our quadrennial fetish with presidential candidates' health records?  John McCain has just released his after a good amount of harping about it by the media, but, personally, I'd rather not know, and I'm sure Sen. McCain would rather not have us know.  Don't get me wrong - I love transparency.  Let me see your tax returns (Cindy McCain?  We're still waiting!), your campaign contributions, the power lunches you've had with unseemly lobbyists.  But let's keep our prostate enlargements to ourselves, shall we?

Belying their powerlessness over metaphysics, many Americans want to believe they're voting for someone who will finish out their term still breathing (at which time we can resume poking our noses into all of their bodily cavities should they choose to run for reelection).  But let's look at history.  In the last hundred years, only four presidencies have met with untimely ends:  Nixon's, JFK's, FDR's, and Warren Harding's.  And Nixon's downfall wasn't even health related - unless you consider sociopathic paranoia to be a medical condition.  Kennedy concealed an array of serious health issues, but his most problematic turned out to be a bullet through the brain.

Before the era of television, things apparently worked a bit differently.  Roosevelt died early in his fourth term at a time when Americans probably would have reelected his cryogenically frozen head, had it been on the ticket.  And back in 1923, Harding died of a heart attack.  (Who knew?)

People die.  The old generally keel over more than the young, but that's far from certain when it comes to presidents.  If I were a betting man, and a morbid one at that, I'd wager that the 46-year-old Obama has more to worry about than the 71-year-old McCain.  Bullets, after all, don't do age discrimination.