No countries for old men

Watching the McCain campaign crumble has almost been painful and if Obama does win tomorrow night, (I mean how many states can the GOP rig) there will be a great deal of analysis and finger pointing about why McCain lost.

Although overcoming the insanity of the Bush administration was an impossible task from the outset, the overwhelming reason should be his age,

I’m sure many will disagree and point to his choice of Palin as his running mate. But I would suggest that in reality she is nothing more than female version of a George Bush and normally as a vice president what would it matter.

However John McCain is 72 years old and with all the pressures of the office, too many people could actually envision him dying in office. The Palin choice just emphasized the fact that he was too old.

Maybe it is just that I am starting to feel my age, but it seems to me that we are at one of those pivotal times when the old guard is being replaced by a younger generation. Politics and the pursuit of power is becoming a younger persons game.

It was even more evident this weekend watching Bob Rae’s pre-announcement of his announcement that he was going to run for the leadership of the Liberal Party.

There are new rules in politics, the conservative ads and their rovian control of messaging during the last election demonstrated that.

Watching Rae stumble blindly through the Duffy interview at Globemedia’s CTV over the weekend, it was evident that he is not playing with the level of intensity needed to compete against a media savvy team run by the 47 year old Harper.

The first article put out by the Globe and Mail (also Globemedia) on Saturday about Rae‘s announcement is almost insulting with it’s tongue in cheek reference to Kory Tenecyke.

Bob Rae chose the very strategic Halloween Friday at 5 pm to announce he will be a candidate for the leadership. In other news, Kory Teneycke is running communications strategy for his campaign.

In fact the short article of roughly 150 words is nothing more than a Tenecyke ramble about how he would attack Rae if he did win the leadership.

The conservatives have learned the new ABC rule of politics, always be campaigning.

Unfortunately for the Liberal Party, Rae at 60 years of age and possibly Ignatieff at 61 are both too old and set in their ways to compete at this level of intensity.

At least that is what Rae demonstrated on the weekend.