Despite being the oldest state in America, Maine has in recent years been surprisingly tolerant of young candidates seeking election to high office. State House Speaker Ryan Fecteau, 32, is one who has benefitted from this, but now the young representative is apparently calling out seniors who also want to get into the political fray for their advanced years.
According to Biddeford Gazette editor Randy Seaver, Fecteau recently posted on Facebook that candidates for Biddeford city council should be identified by the number of years they’ve walked the earth.
In particular, Fecteau asked – apparently rhetorically – how old Clem Fleurent, who is seeking at At Large seat on the city’s council is. Fleurent is 90 and has surely seen a thing or two in his life and long career, which has included stints in local government as well as the private sector.
Fecteau’s partner Dylan Doughty, 38, is a current city councilor seeking re-election but, Seaver reports, the youthful House speaker was unconcerned with the ages of other candidates — just Fleurent’s.
When the subject of age came up in the 1984 presidential debate between incumbent Ronald Reagan, then 73, and upstart Minnesota Senator Walter Mondale, then 56, the elder statesman, sensing both a challenge and a critique, was gracious to the core:
“I will not hold my opponent’s youth and inexperience against him,” Reagan quipped. Fleurent may remember that encounter far more clearly than Fecteau, who wouldn’t be born until nine years after the issue was then raised.
It is fine and well that Fecteau should distinguish himself by various superlatives of youth, whether those involve serving on the Biddeford School Board or as the head of the Maine House. But taking pains to point out how old another candidate in a race in which his significant other is competing seems a bit cheeky.
Especially in light of how his fellow Democrat, then 82-year-old President Joe Biden, performed in a debate just last summer. Or maybe that’s the point. Still in Maine, and even in Biddeford, there are still those who respect their elders.
