Here’s something so dumb it’s brought me out of hiding to blog again: a column in the Chicago Tribune by McCain advisor Steven Calabresi arguing that Barack Obama is too young to be president. His argument: the Constitutional requirement that a president must be at least 35 was created in a time when life expectancy was shorter, ergo a president today should be 55 or 60. (Or, it goes without saying in the column, 72.) Support for the too-young argument: the three youngest presidents, Teddy Roosevelt, JFK, and Bill Clinton “committed serious rookie blunders because they were too young.” Specifics: Roosevelt’s “gunboat diplomacy with Latin American countries such as Panama,” Clinton’s “major overreaches, from his gays in the military plan to Hillary’s failed health-care proposal,” and Kennedy’s “show of weakness [in a 1961 summit with Khrushchev that] led to the Cuban Missile Crisis and brought the world to the edge of annihilation.”

There’s nothing about any of these “blunders” that can be laid exclusively to the president’s youth, though. Even in the most plausible instance of inexperience, it’s not like JFK showed up for his Vienna summit with Khrushchev wearing a beanie. Clinton’s “major overreaches” were mere policy differences, which a Reaganaut like Calabresi would naturally oppose. And no historian I know ever explained TR’s taking of the Panama Canal as an act of juvenile rashness. TR was just as feisty and impulsive on the day he died in 19201919 as he had been during the Panama affair in 1902.

Calabresi’s argument is flawed in other ways. The three presidents he criticizes were largely successful in the long run, and at the end of their terms, extremely popular. In addition, Roosevelt’s actions in Panama pioneered the strong presidency, which Bush has turned into something just shy of kingship, and McCain’s just fine with that. And the ideal political leader, we’ve learned in recent years, believes in the same things today he’s believed in all his life, because to change one’s positions is to be a flip-flopper, so isn’t a man’s character supposed to be fully formed in his youth? If so, age shouldn’t matter.

But in the end, looking at the numbers pretty much blows up the argument. Fifty-year-old James K. Polk manipulated the country into an unnecessary war of conquest; 59-year-old Lyndon Johnson let the Vietnam War spiral out of control; 53-year-old Ulysses S. Grant permitted the worst presidential scandals in history up to that time to happen on his watch, the scandals of the administration of 57-year-old Warren G. Harding eclipsed them, and 61-year-old Richard Nixon’s forced his resignation. The greatest Republican of them all, Ronald Reagan, traded arms for hostages at age 75. And George W. Bush became president at 54. This list, by no means a complete one, nearly proves the opposite of Calabresi’s argument: Men serving as president past age 50 have screwed up most of all.