Probability

Last week Kim and I were talking with a friend about the state of the US presidential campaign. It has lost the excitement for me of late. Perhaps it is the lack of any definite progress in the political process. Obama and Hillary keep duking it out while McCain watches from the sidelines. Of course, the election news coverage may be overshadowed by the chaos in the US financial markets and the US economic downturn. This is likely to change with the Pennsylvania primary this week. We'll learn if Hillary has enough wind in her sails to make it to the convention and if Obama hasn't shot himself in the foot with certain off-handed remarks about middle class Americans. I liked this article by David Brooks in which he wrote, "It was inevitable that the period of “Yes We Can!” deification would come to an end."

But I digress. What I really wanted to write about was John McCain's vice-presidential pick. Voters are more likely to give more scrutiny to McCain's choice, given his somewhat elevated age. The question I have is, what is the chance that McCain would die in office?

First, we could base our assumptions on how many US presidents have died in office. Here's the list:

William Henry Harrison  April 4, 1841   Natural Causes
Zachary Taylor          July 9, 1850    Natural Causes
Abraham Lincoln         April 14, 1865  Assassinated
James A. Garfield       Sept. 19, 1881  Assassinated
William McKinley        Sept. 14, 1901  Assassinated
Warren G. Harding       August 2, 1923  Natural Causes
Franklin D. Roosevelt   April 12, 1945  Natural Causes
John F. Kennedy         Nov. 22, 1963   Assassinated

That's 8 of 43 presidents. I would argue, though, that since 4 are assassinations, they don't really count. We are worried about the possibility of McCain dying from natural causes. My friend also points out that there have only been 37 men elected as President and 55 presidential terms. So the probability of a US president dying in his term is 4/55 (7.3%).

It occurred to me that this may not be completely accurate, since our medical care has improved and the above data would surely be skewed by the health challenges of the 1800s. A better picture could be obtained by looking at actuarial data. A Google search quickly suggests that the odds of death for a man in his 70s is about 15%.

Those seem like pretty good odds to me. So the real question is this: Who will he pick? Romney? Huckabee? Thompson? Bob the Builder ("Yes we can, too!")?