Nikki Haley's prejudice against aged politicians

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Nikki Haley has come up with something impressive — an idea nobody can admirably believe is cool and everyone secretly thinks would be helpful. Also, one for which she needs buy-in if she's to succeed in her current endeavor, and one that absolutely should backfire on her.

Haley wants to require mental competency tests for politicians older than 75. In other words, her leading opponents. In other words, ageism.

I'm generalizing, of course. I actually don't know what everyone thinks. If experience bears out, it's probably different from what I think.

Haley is generalizing, too. Her proposed cognitive test, she wrote in a commentary published May 1 on the website of Fox News, "is not a qualification for office," and failing it "would not result in removal." It appears she would have it be what might be termed a mandatory option, one that would validate her premise if people choose to participate and would raise suspicions of anyone who declines — what are they or their secret handlers trying to hide?

But first things first. Do you even know who Nikki Haley is? According to various polls, more than a third of Americans don't.

If you're reading this article, in this section of the Star Tribune, you almost certainly do. But for the unknowing, Haley is a former governor of South Carolina. She also served We the People of America as ambassador to the United Nations for two brief years during the Trump administration. That's 24 in early dog years, according to the current method of estimation, and at least 240 in Trump years, according to mine.

And she's running for president!

Moreover, people who participate in prediction markets are willing to pay 6 cents out of a possible 100 to bet that she's likely to succeed!

I don't mean to diminish Haley. I'd be pleased to see her contend for the Republican nomination. Republicans deserve to have a candidate who (a) unlike front-runner Donald Trump, actually believes in the conservative agenda, and (b) unlike unannounced backup plan Ron DeSantis, stands a chance of promoting it without alienating those who don't. And Democrats deserve a credible challenge.

That is, in part, why Minnesota Republicans chose U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio in the state's 2016 caucuses. They may have overestimated Rubio's qualities then, as I may be doing for Haley's now. But, more important, they properly assessed Trump's. He came in third. That made the state's GOP one of the minority to recognize — in advance, and at least briefly — Trump's unique unsuitability for public office. (Most of the other dissenting states went for U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, who placed second here.)

But look at what Haley has gone and done: She's implied that cognitive skills automatically become suspect at an arbitrary age.

She's right to an extent. At a mere 56, I find that my hands can no longer make the fluid movements required to swiftly create a printed page of the Star Tribune using Adobe's layout software. And after a full day of reading, my eyes won't focus. I can't keep 15 disparate tasks in my working memory like I used to — at most now, 14. But I haven't got dumb.

I know people in their 70s and 80s — as I'm sure most of you readers do, and you even may be such a person yourself — who retain mental acuity and exercise it each passing year with the additional wisdom borne of experience. You've no doubt heard that the number of brain cells you possess peaks by the time you reach adulthood, but other research has shown that the making of neurons can continue into one's 90s. (If a scientific factoid ever sounds straightforward, trust that it isn't.)

Earlier I wrote that I don't actually know what everyone thinks about administering cognitive tests to elder politicians. I was slyly withholding. In at least one poll, by Fox in February, nearly 4 out of every 5 respondents favored a requirement like the one Haley is proposing.

Should we take that seriously? Well, in the same poll, half of respondents said they were not closely following congressional investigations into Hunter Biden's business dealings, yet 90% of them felt qualified to opine firmly on whether he'd done something wrong.

Assessing any set of perceptions is a problem of sufficient information.

To Republicans, it's a foregone conclusion that President Joe Biden, at age 80, has lost mental leaps and bounds. Screw language sensitivity — they'll just come out and say he's senile. But Biden's supporters are in a pickle, too, since their man (or his alleged cabal) limits his public speaking. Biden has always been an adventure in front of a microphone. What voters don't know is how much worse that slipshoddiness is, or if it extends to his Oval Office deliberations.

For that matter, voters can't really know if his successor in the event of death or disability, Vice President Kamala Harris, 58, chops as much word salad in private as she does in public. I'm not saying I have a special insight about her — I don't — but public presentation, important as it is in such roles, is not always the truest test.

It took people willing to speak up from behind the scenes to inform California voters that their always-sharp senior senator, Dianne Feinstein, now 89, had become less capable in recent years due to the onset of memory loss. Further health issues have kept her away from Washington, causing problems for her party and its narrow Senate advantage. So far, Feinstein insists on serving out the six-year term to which she was elected in 2018. There's no constitutional wall to stop her.

This is where Haley has a partial point. She says the purpose of mental cognitive tests for aged politicians would be transparency.

That would make them like releasing tax returns, which also is not a requirement but has come to be an expectation honored by many candidates. Still, tax returns provide information the public cannot otherwise easily know. By contrast, voters can observe a candidate's broad thinking ability, or its concealment, and judge accordingly.

Turning that over to a test score would relieve them of their responsibility. Term limits are wrongheaded, in my estimation, for the same reason.

Specifically, Haley proposes that politicians take the Montreal Cognitive Assessment Test, which tries to identify mild cognitive impairment or early dementia. Trump himself took this test at age 72 in 2018 and said he aced it, so there's that. Dementia experts said at the time that they wouldn't use the test as a sole basis for anyone's diagnosis.

As I mentioned earlier, Haley could use a bit more name recognition, and this is a cheap way to get it. It undoubtedly helped her when Don Lemon, then a 56-year-old CNN anchor, said that she, as a woman of a certain age (51), was herself past prime.

That was after Haley first proposed the cognitive tests in February.

She's still in the race, and he's out of a job.

David Banks is the Star Tribune's assistant commentary editor. He's at David.Banks@startribune.com.