To be clear, the immediate headache for Democrats comes from incoming revelations about Al Franken, who’s turning out to be the wrong kind of hands-on policymaker. But a more enduring issue, one that keeps getting raised, has to do with the nursing-home age of Democratic bigwigs. “The Democratic Party has an age problem,” declared a CNN headline in October. “Our leadership is old and creaky, including me,” Howard Dean recently told MSNBC. “The Democrats’ old-people problem” was a headline on Axios last week. The alleged problem, one that was laid out in a cruel skit on Saturday Night Live recently, is that the age of Democrats is correlated to the degree that they’re out of touch. Nancy Pelosi is a remarkable tactician but hardly a voice for tomorrow’s hopes.

If you had to make a case for tossing out the old guard, it’d be easy to come up with more reasons. The people we elect, particularly our presidents, reflect our national identity, so youthful vigor seems more appealing than age and cocked ears. Democrats pride themselves on being multicultural and gender-balanced in all things, so it looks shabby if elderly whites keep running the show. Young people are less likely to collapse in public, as Hillary Clinton did during her campaign in 2016, or receive diagnoses of Alzheimer’s, as Ronald Reagan did a mere five years after leaving office. Finally, old people were around during the 1970s, when half of America seems either to have behaved badly or looked the other way.

But these arguments aren’t amazingly compelling. Compared to other matters, age seems to be a trivial problem. Those who focus on it tend either to be journalists with an interesting observation—that leading Democrats are old and white—without too much to make of it, or they’re ambitious younger politicians who want to elbow out grandma. “I do think it’s time to pass the torch to a new generation of leaders,” said California Representative Linda Sanchez, who is conveniently on hand to grab it should the need arise.

To start with, much as Americans enjoy having a leader who is youthful, it’s a lot like having a college professor with amazing teeth—nice to have, all other things being equal, but not a first-rank consideration. We want someone who can get our preferred policies enacted. That many Democratic stars are old and white doesn’t seem to matter much to voters, not least since up-and-coming Democrats are a more mixed bag, and they’ll be in charge soon enough. Vigilance and transparency when it comes to health are a good antidote to worries about feebleness. And, as bad as the 1970s might have been, sexual predation seems to be doing all too fine in our present age, too.

A serious age-related danger to Democrats would be that of an elderly base. This, however, is not a Democratic problem but a Republican one. As writer Daniel J. McGraw pointed out on Politico, Republican voters are dying off faster than they’re being replaced.

The real problem Democrats have is in ideology, or lack of it. The political-consultant class places too much emphasis on packaging and too little on ideas, which matter now more than ever. What wins over the kids these days isn’t someone who looks like Justin Trudeau—unless you’re a Canadian or Jann Wenner—but someone who can articulate a clear and principled worldview that challenges the status quo. Bernie Sanders was one of the oldest people ever to compete in a Democratic presidential primary, and it was young people whom he attracted.