Opinion Today: How healthy should a president be?

The focus on age during this election season raises deeper questions about fitness for the job.

View in browser|nytimes.com June 24, 2024 SUPPORTED BY AMERICA MAGAZINE By Neel V. Patel Staff Editor, Opinion When the American public tunes in to the first presidential debate of the campaign season on Thursday, there will be — among other things — endless guesswork among viewers trying to intuit the health of President Biden and Donald Trump as they spar with each other. Supporters of either (or neither) candidate will eagerly look for any signs that the current and the former president are facing declines in physical and cognitive health — parsing every inflection of every syllable, every contortion of the face and every movement of the hands and head and body — all to divine whether these two individuals are afflicted by something that they aren't sharing with the rest of us. Whatever policy points and arguments they make may seem, for some, beside the point. There is no getting around the fact that the ages of the candidates is an intense topic of debate this election cycle. And most of us can agree that while we ought to be mindful of our biases, evaluating the physical and cognitive fitness of political leaders is a necessary part of judging candidates who seek the highest office in the land. And that means their health matters — even if we're merely talking about the perception of their health. Nevertheless, as the Opinion contributing writer and critical-care physician Daniela Lamas writes in her latest essay, it's incumbent on us to challenge the assumptions we bring to this debate. Health is complicated — and many conditions do not necessarily render someone unable to do the job. Every test measures something different, and the results themselves can be interpreted differently. The last thing we should be doing is attempting to politicize the information candidates make available and publicize. These questions aren't going to get solved by the end of Thursday's debate, much less by Election Day. But as Lamas points out in her essay, such conversations are a good starting point for us to decide, as a nation, how much we want our politicians to tell us about their health and fitness, and make some clear formulations about how old is too old and how unhealthy is too unhealthy. Read the guest essay: Vanessa Saba Guest Essay The Health Information Voters Need From Biden and Trump We live in an age when people can live longer and healthier even with significant health conditions. What does this mean for future presidents? By Daniela J. Lamas A MESSAGE FROM AMERICA MAGAZINE Get a smart, Catholic take on the world How does Joe Biden's Catholic faith influence his politics? How is Pope Francis changing the Catholic Church? Get a Jesuit perspective from America magazine. For over 100 years, America magazine has been the go-to source of spiritual and intellectual exploration for American Catholics. 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