"It’s time for me to be mature."

Says the 89-year-old Frank Lautenberg, ceding the stage to Cory Booker.

Chuck Schumer tells Cory Booker: "Frank deserves the time and respect to make his own decisions."

Let the 89-year-old Senator Frank R. Lautenberg decide when it's time to yield to the younger generation, the Dems are saying to the 43-year-old Newark mayor. They're saying that publicly anyway. I'm sure nobody wants to get caught showing any disrespect for the the old man, despite the absurdity of his intransigency. Privately, they must be dying for him to go.

"Should Elderly Politicians Make Like the Pope and Quit?"

Asks David Weigel.

Pope Benedict is three years younger than Sen. Frank Lautenberg, who's puttering around condemning the very idea of Cory Booker running against him....

[C]overage of Lautenberg... high-fives him for his vigor. A recent Philadelphia Inquirer story pointed out that the senator had returned from "a cold that became the flu" and was "wielding a cane -- which he insisted he didn't really need," but otherwise focused on his "feistiness."

Weigel mixes 2 topics: the individual's decision to continue despite age and infirmity and the way the media (and the rest of us) "play along." Nothing about what the Pope is doing changes the playing along part of it. We've come to believe that age discrimination is wrong, and we've allowed that to mean too much.

Age discrimination isn't like race discrimination! Age takes a toll on people and it matters and affects their performance. A specific individual may be doing relatively well for his age, and we ought to see him as an individual, but age matters. Statutory law prohibiting age discrimination tells us not to take age into account in some situations, but that doesn't include electoral politics. Feel free to boldly assail Lautenberg for clinging to his Senate seat. (And feel free to criticize judges who seem to be hanging on too long, especially Supreme Court Justices.)

Is the Pope any help here? He waited until he was 85 to step down. And he began the onerous work when he was nearly 80. The previous Pope — immensely admired — made a point of sticking with the job through a long, painful decline. I think both of these Popes encourage people to keep going and not to cede the work to the less old.