Clint Eastwood is going to make a film about Sully Sullenberger, the pilot who landed that US Airways flight on the Hudson after a flock of geese knocked out both the plane’s engines.

This news is going to lead us into an interesting discussion of the presidential election. We will also try to get in at least one more mention of the geese. Stupid birds.

Both the movie and the election are, in a way, stories about age. Eastwood is 85 — “at the top of his game, not to mention a global treasure,” said a Warner Bros. executive in a press release.

Some of you probably remember the fabled moment at the 2012 Republican National Convention when Eastwood interviewed an empty chair. It may go down in the annals of history as the worst performance ever by a global treasure.

But Eastwood seemed unfazed, and he went back to making movies, including the preposterously successful “American Sniper.” This just goes to prove that we live in a world in which the possibilities for growth or mutation are endless. Making a spectacle of yourself on national television at the age of 82 would seem to be pretty much a career-ender. However, there is nothing like a movie with a $543 million gross to trigger a new beginning.

Sullenberger’s miracle landing was about aging, too. It happened in January 2009. The nation had just elected 47-year-old Barack Obama president after a campaign in which he vowed to replace the stupid, overheated politics of the baby-boom generation with something more cool and transactional. We were all ready for a youth explosion.

Then Sullenberger, 57, brought his crippled plane down on the river while three flight attendants, aged 51, 57 and 58, coolly herded the passengers to a safe rescue on the wing. Suddenly, we found ourselves getting worried whenever we drew a wrinkle-free flight crew. Old was in.

Obama went on to accomplish many things as president, but that new-generation-politics transformation was definitely not among them. Now Hillary Clinton, 67, is the huge favorite to win the Democratic presidential nomination to succeed him.

Meanwhile, the Republican field is packed with people like first-term senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, both 44. Or Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, a 47-year-old who has bragged that he could put off running for another 20 years “and still be about the same age as the former secretary of state.”

The obvious response to that is: good idea.

Rubio has been dropping multiple references to the election as a “generational choice” between the politics of tomorrow and people who are “promising to take us back to yesterday.” This is supposed to be a reference to Clinton, but it conveniently also works for 62-year-old Jeb Bush, one of Rubio’s main competitors.

Or really, for Clint Eastwood, although I have the feeling that any of the Republican candidates would be extremely happy to have Eastwood on their team. As long as he didn’t bring that chair to the convention.

“It’s a rigorous physical ordeal, I think, to be able to campaign for the presidency,” Senator Rand Paul, 52, said about Clinton’s candidacy. Now this is a woman who, as secretary of state, visited 112 countries, traveling nearly a million miles. You can criticize a lot of things about Hillary Clinton, but there aren’t many people better at taking the show on the road.

(Except — did you know that the Rolling Stones are on a national tour right this minute? Yes! Mick Jagger, the man who once announced “I’ll never tour when I’m 50,” was in Minnesota on Tuesday, killing time during a 15-city sweep. Jagger, 71, and drummer Charlie Watts, 74, visited the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, where a staff member said they showed particular interest in the collection of American folk-art furniture. It is possible this was not how Jagger spent his time between shows in the 1970s. But still.)

Arguments over age and the presidency go back at least to 1840, when the 67-year-old William Henry Harrison was described as “a living mass of ruined matter” in one rather hostile newspaper editorial. And Harrison did sort of prove that age was an issue, when he died one month into his administration.

However, that was an era when doctors made house calls bearing leeches. Now our arguments over age can be a little more sophisticated.

Would you rather have a president with a lot of experience or one with new ideas? And what, by the way, are those new ideas? It’s going to have to be something more novel than reducing business taxes.

We’re electing a new leader to pilot our ship. Do we care more about quick reflexes or a seasoned response to crises? We can talk forever about redirecting the course. But, most of all, you do want someone who will avoid the damned geese.