ABC's evening news program attempts to play the age card on McCain, which seems like an awfully strange medium for that message: at 65, ABC's Charles Gibson is only six years younger than McCain, and given the similar demographics of his viewers, is it wise to posit to them that someone of their generation might be too old to be president?

President Reagan was 10 years older than my dad, and I can remember Ed Sr. being, shall we say, less than thrilled when the media tried a similar whispering campaign 28 years ago.

On the other hand, as Mark Finkelstein notes:

In a political season in which Barack Obama has delighted in playing the age card—see "lost his bearings," "wander around," and multiple mentions of McCain's "half-century of service," Democrats are now demonstrating that they're even willing to use an opponent's superannuation on each other.

I'd love to know the conversations going on in AARP HQ, and the mental hoops their staff will go through before their house organ reflexively makes the case for young Mr. Obama.

Update: Ed Morrissey sits in on "McCain Conference Call on Health Records":

At the point of the time when I had to start my show prep, the CBS News doctor had begun filibustering the conference. He apparently figured that some sort of conspiracy surrounds McCain’s use of hydrochlorothiazide, a routine diuretic indicated by the kidney stones McCain has had in the past. I hung up at the eighth follow-up on this question.

Someone at CBS playing the age card seems particularly ironic; CBS's viewership demographic skews pretty elderly as well--as does its talent pool: on 60 Minutes, Andy Rooney is 89, Mike Wallace is 90, and Morley Safer is a comparatively teenybopperish 76. As Slate's Kurt Andersen noted six years ago:

So 65 is the new 50. Why? I think it's primarily an epiphenomenon of the baby boom. The national TV news anchor was invented during baby boomers' formative years, when all those anchors were roughly the same age as our parents. To be anchorlike was to be sober, wise, older, parental—and so it remains. Because baby boomers persist in thinking of themselves as youngish, they can't quite accept as bona fide an anchor who is not a decade or two older than they are. And because people in their 40s and 50s now run the culture—including its TV news operations—that cultural norm is enforced.

Except when it's convenient that it not be, of course.