"Older people, if they play their cards right, can get away with anything. The all-time examples of this is, of course, Ronald Reagan. Here's a man who was twice elected to the most powerful position on Earth despite needing a TelePrompTer to correctly identify what year it was. But no matter out-of-it he seemed to be, the people loved him. It was if we were in an airplane, and the pilot got sick, so our kindly old Uncle Bob had to take the controls. We didn't expect as much from President Uncle Bob. We considered it a major triumph if he didn't crash. Remember how he handled the Iran-contra Never-Ending Scandal from Hell? He went on national television, the President of the United States, and said it wasn't his fault, because he was not aware, at the time, of what his foreign policy was. In fact he had to appoint a Distinguished Commission to find out what his foreign policy was, and get back to him. Now if he'd been a young President, some little Mister Competence right-on-top-of-everything jogging fact-spouting pissant whippersnapper like Jimmy Carter, his own wife would have called for his impeachment. But with Ronald Reagan, the voters, who have also never had the vaguest idea what our foreign policy was, were very forgiving. "Yeah," they said, "How's he supposed to remember every darned time he authorizes the sale of weapons to enemy nations? Why don't you medias leave him alone?!" And Ron went right on grinning and being popular and pretty much limiting his executive actions to signing stuff and having polyps removed until the end of his wildly successful term in office."