821–830 of 1001 posts
Putting politics aside … Why don’t they have an age limit on the president (or any elected office)? E.g., you must be younger than the average life expectancy (currently men: 73yo / female: 79) - while in office. https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
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Air traffic controller here: we have a mandatory requirement age of 56.
And you can't even get hired -- by law -- if you're over 30 years old. It's absurd . The FAA is complaining that they don't have enough ATCs, but have done absolutely nothing to broaden the hiring pool. "We've tried nothing, and we're all out of ideas!"
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Airline pilots have a legally mandated retirement age of 65. Running the country seems like it's at least as mission-critical as flying a plane.
The president has a large support staff to keep the lights on most of the time. Unless the nation is physically under attack, the president's day-to-day job is probably physically less demanding than that of pilots. They have plenty of time for golf.
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The reality is that the campaign donations accumulated by the Biden/Harris ticket are only available to Harris. Anybody else is funding-challenged even more than Harris at this point. From the standpoint of campaign finance laws and the practical realities of fund-raising, it was Harris all along.
The Biden/Harris campaign can not donate their donations?
Putting politics aside … Why don’t they have an age limit on the president (or any elected office)? E.g., you must be younger than the average life expectancy (currently men: 73yo / female: 79) - while in office. https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
The same reason we don't have a race or sex limit on the Presidency. We should only have competency limits regardless of any other factors. My grandfather died at 101. He was extremely sharp until he was 98 and on no medication. I'd vote for that 95 year-old over either of our current choices without hesitation.
Objective qualifications are much simpler. We could argue for months about whether a president is competent, but it takes like 7 seconds to decide whether they’re older than some arbitrary bar.
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> But he did campaign on a single term. He did not really do this.
I never could find a direct quote of Biden himself saying he would be a single term president, but his campaign team said it regularly in public interviews.
Everyone expected him to drop out earlier, but I think the reason he stayed in as long as he did was to take all the bullets for Kamala until he felt confident all the other potential challengers would get behind her.
What he didn't want to do was drop out early, let Kamala get battered and bloodied by her own party nomination process, win the nomination, then lose to Trump just because she'd been dragged through the mud in the media for months.
This was a forgone conclusion since the debate but there needed to be prolonged drama to save face
I think the prolonged drama made it far far worse for Biden's legacy
We live in unprecedented times. The last time we had a sitting president not seek reelection like this was LBJ and he announced his intentions in March, 1968 [1]. We don't have the communications media we have now. This had a massive impact. The Democrats were largely unprepared, in part because RFK was assassinated in June. This ushered in Nixon who expanded the war in Vietnam, started the illegal bombing of Cambodi…