Helen Lewis writes:

Last week, something happened that is extremely rare in Washington, D.C., but completely normal outside of it: People openly described an octogenarian as frail and overdue for retirement. The subject of discussion was Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District of Columbia’s nonvoting congressional delegate, who turned 88 on Friday. Recently, several D.C. figures have questioned her ability to serve.

Beverly Perry, a senior adviser to Mayor Muriel Bowser, went on the record to say that it was “hard” for Holmes Norton “to navigate the political waters as she has in the past.” Holmes Norton dismissed concerns about her age and, for good measure, also said that she was planning to run for another term. “I don’t know why anybody would even ask me,” the Democrat added, to which anyone outside of American politics would surely respond: because you’re older than nylon stockings and the ballpoint pen!

To a degree that seems bizarre to me as an outsider, the American party system, particularly on the Democratic side, defers to incumbents. (Since the 2022 midterm election, eight members of Congress have died in office. All of them were Democrats.) But in Holmes Norton’s case, something unusual has occurred: People close to her have continued to express concern about her ability to serve, and, even more unusually, have done so under their own names. “As her friend and someone who deeply admires her, I’ve made my peace with recommending to her that I think this is her final term,” the Democratic strategist Donna Brazile told The New York Times. The candor of Perry, Brazile, and others allowed the media to report forthrightly about Holmes Norton’s decline—her forgetting names, communicating in broken sentences, and struggling to read prepared remarks or recognize long-standing colleagues.

Eventually, the delegate put out a more ambivalent statement, saying that “through thoughtful discussions with my friends, family and closest advisers, I’m still considering my options for the next election cycle.”

In fact, even a moment’s deliberation would tell Holmes Norton that her constituents would be best served by her gracious retirement—as would American democracy. [Continue reading…]