Irish-American gerontocracy

You don't hear about it much anymore, but Irish leaders were famous for staying in power forever.

Caitlin Flanagan, whose father Thomas wrote a great historical novel about Ireland in 1798, The Year of the French, tweets:

Although Biden is not all that Irish, it is worth remembering that it used to be a well-known Thing in American big city politics that the Irish-American mayor, the Irish-American political machine boss (if different from the mayor), and the Irish-American cardinal tended to hang on in power until very late in life.

That’s the joke behind the February 1977 special issue of National Lampoon saluting JFK’s Fifth Inaugural:

The writers imagine an alternative timeline in which Jackie rather than Jack Kennedy was hit by Oswald’s bullet and in the national mourning all that term limit nonsense is forgotten and JFK matures into Mayor Quimby from The Simpsons. As I wrote in 2013:

The overarching gag is that if Jackie Kennedy had been the one martyred in Dallas, Jack would have settled into the Irish politician's pattern of staying in power for roughly ever (e.g., Eamon de Valera, Richard J. Daley in Chicago, or James Curley, who was mayor of Boston on and off from 1914 to 1950); but JFK would have pulled this off by mobilizing the puerile energies of white baby boomers, rather like Chairman Mao's cult of personality did during his Cultural Revolution.

On the other hand, well-tended men didn’t live quite as long back then. E.g., Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley dropped dead in office at 74 in his sixth term.

In contrast, his son Richard M. Daley completed six terms, and then retired at 69 in 2011. (He’s still alive at 82.)