Just Who Are You Calling Old?

I could barely contain my shock when I read the offhand comment that George Artz, a longtime Democratic operative and former press secretary to Mayor Edward I. Koch, recently made to The Washington Post: He said that Rep. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) would make a great replacement for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton because Lowey "is in her 70s, and her health is so-so, so she would be the perfect interim pick to serve out the term."

I've got news for Artz: In a town of power geezers, the 71-year old Lowey is a spring chicken. Sure, we have a 47-year-old president-elect. But it doesn't hurt to be well past the standard retirement age when you're traversing the halls of the Capitol.

This is a town where Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), 69, earned Young Turk status this month by unseating 82-year-old Energy and Commerce Chairman John Dingell (D-Mich.) -- a town where 88-year-old Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens recently made it clear that he has no immediate plans to step down because the court now issues full opinions in half as many cases as when he joined it in 1975. "It's still a fulltime job; I wouldn't want to say otherwise," Stevens told an audience earlier this month in Gainesville, Fla. "But if we had the same kind of workload today that we had then, I would have resigned 10 years ago."

And look at the elderly group Lowey would join if New York Gov. David A. Paterson appointed her to take the Senate seat Clinton will vacate if she becomes Barack Obama's secretary of state. The average age of a senator in the 110th Congress is 61.8, according to the Senate Historian's Office, and this number will only drop to 61.3 next year with the election of nine new senators. (It's worth noting that the average age of a senator in the very first Congress was 47, but Americans' life expectancy was much shorter then.) One key curve-wrecker is Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), the oldest current senator at 91, but even he isn't the most venerable member in Senate history: The late Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) served until the age of 100.

While many of Congress's elderly men need assistance from their staffers to make it to votes, Lowey pursues a demanding work schedule that often exhausts her 20-something aides. She usually starts her days in Washington reading newspapers at 6 a.m., according to spokesman Matthew Dennis, then either swims or bikes, and she regularly works in the office until 9 or 10 p.m. "By the time you straggle into work in the morning, she's already been swimming and been to a breakfast," recalls Beth Tritter, who worked for Lowey for almost a decade before joining the Glover Park Group, a Washington lobbying and public relations firm, last year.

Moreover, as chairman of a key House subcommittee during the 110th Congress, Lowey led one congressional delegation to the Czech Republic, Pakistan, India and Hungary and another to Morocco, Ghana, Liberia, Uganda and Kenya. And that's not even counting the schlepping she does back to her district in Westchester County and to visit her three children and eight grandchildren.

All this activity aside, some voters may still wonder whether Lowey could last another six years beyond 2010, when a special election will be held to fill Clinton's seat. Not to worry -- especially since she's female.

Sandeep C. Kulkarni, a medical student at the University of California at San Francisco Medical School who crunched the numbers, estimates that, statistically speaking, Lowey has more than 16 years to live, and if she's comparable to women living in the healthiest counties in the United States, she's got 17.5 more years. Majid Ezzati, an associate professor of international health at Harvard University's School of Public Health, said that it's not unusual for someone Lowey's age "to have a fair amount of healthy life in them." The question facing Americans, Ezzati said, is, "In an aging society, especially, what's the right distribution of work? The longer people work, the longer they can contribute economically to a society."

So maybe that's the way voters should look at the somewhat aged cadre of men and women who dominate Washington: They're just squeezing as much productivity as they can out of their elected representatives. It reminds me of what my late grandmother said after President Clinton, watching his first Supreme Court nominee, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, address the media, cried and called her "a person of immense character": "He's just never met a Jewish grandmother before."

All that said, Lowey's aides have been sending out signals that she may not be interested in taking Clinton's place in the Senate. Having served nearly 20 years in the House, she's got plenty of seniority now -- and she just might want to stick around for a while to enjoy it.

eilperinj@washpost.com

Juliet Eilperin is a Washington Post staff writer and the author of "Fight Club Politics: How Partisanship Is Poisoning the House of Representatives."