Senior politicians discuss the Democratic Party youth movement

Barbara Boxer decided she was done. At the dawn of her sixties, freshly re-elected to the US Senate, she decided that her fourth term would be her last.

“I just felt like it was time,” Boxer said. “I wanted to do something else.”

Furthermore, she knew that the Democratic bench was heavily staffed with many bright candidates, including Kamala Harris, then California’s attorney general, who succeeded Boxer in Washington en route to her selection as Joe Biden’s vice president.

When Boxer retired in 2017, after serving 24 years in the Senate, she left one of the most powerful and privileged positions in American politics, one that many clung to until their last breath.

(Boxer tried to gently nudge fellow Democrat and former Senate colleague Dianne Feinstein, whose mental and physical decline was widely chronicled during her final, difficult years in office. Ignoring calls to step down, Feinstein died at age 90, hours after voting on a procedural matter in the Senate.)

Today, an effort is underway among Democrats, from Hawaii to Massachusetts, to force other high-ranking lawmakers to yield, as Boxer did, to a new generation of younger leaders. The movement is driven by the usual boundless ambition, as well as the revulsion toward Donald Trump and the existential angst that grips a political party every time it loses a dispiriting election like the one Democrats faced in 2024.

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has become the most high-profile target.

Last week, she attracted a second significant reelection challenger, state Sen. Scott Wiener, who entered the contest alongside tech millionaire Saikat Chakrabarti, who has been campaigning against the incumbent for nearly a year.

Pelosi — who is 85 and has not faced a serious election fight in San Francisco since Ronald Reagan was in the White House — is expected to announce sometime after California’s Nov. 4 special election whether she will run again in 2026.

Boxer, who turns 85 next month, offered no advice to Pelosi, although she pushed back against the idea that age necessarily equates to infirmity or political obsolescence. She talked about Ted Kennedy and John McCain, two of the senators she served with who remained pivotal and influential in Congress well into their 60s.

On the other hand, Boxer said, “Some people don’t deserve to be around for five minutes, let alone five years… They’re 50. Does that feel good? No. There are people who are old and out of ideas at 60.”

There is, Boxer said, “no single measure” of when a lawmaker has passed his or her expiration date. Better, she suggested, for voters to examine what motivates someone to stay in power. Are they purpose-driven – and still able to get the job done – “or is it a personal ego thing or a psychological thing?”

“My last six years have been the most prolific,» said Boxer, who opposes both term limits and a mandatory retirement age for members of Congress. “And if they had said 65 and over, I wouldn’t have been there.”

Art Agnos has not chosen to leave office.

He was 53 — in the blushes of youth, compared to some of today’s veteran Democrats — when he lost his bid for re-election after just one term as mayor of San Francisco.

“I was in the middle of my prime, that’s why I ran for office,” he said. “And frankly,” he added with a laugh, “I still feel like I’m in the prime of my life at 87.”

A longtime friend and ally of Pelosi, Agnos has bristled at the ageism he sees as targeting lawmakers of a certain generation. Why, he asked, is this acceptable in politics when it is deplored in almost every other field of activity?

“In what profession are we saying we want bright young people who have never done this before to take over because they are bright, young and say the right things? » Agnos asked rhetorically. “Would you go and say, ‘Let me find a brain surgeon who has never done this before, but who is young and bright and shows great promise.’ »We don’t do that. Really ?

“Give me someone who has experience,” Agnos said, “who has been through this and knows how to handle a particular crisis or problem.”

Pete Wilson also left office earlier than he would have liked, but that was because term limits forced him to resign after eight years as governor of California. (Before that, he served eight years in the Senate and 11 years as mayor of San Diego.)

“I thought I did a good job … and a number of people said, ‘Well, it’s a shame you can’t run for a third term,'” Wilson said as he headed to New Haven, Conn., for his college reunion, Yale’s class of 1955. “Actually, I agreed with them.”

Yet, unlike Boxer, Wilson supports term limits as a way to inject fresh blood into the political system and prevent too many incumbents from recklessly extending their terms.

Not that he’s blind to the urge to hold on. Power. The advantages. And perhaps above all, the desire to get things done.

At 92, Wilson actively practices law in Century City and didn’t hesitate: “Yes! he exclaimed – when asked if he considered himself capable of serving today as governor, even as he passes through a tenth decade on Earth.

His wife, Gayle, could be heard laughing in the background.

“She laughs,” Wilson said dryly, “because she knows she’s in no danger if I do.”