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Jimmy Carter, 95, Calls for Presidential Age Limit That Biden & Sanders Would Exceed

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Jimmy Carter — the legendarily incompetent and naive former Democratic president — has weighed in on at least one aspect of the 2020 Democratic primary, and his words weren’t positive.

Speaking during his annual address at the Carter Center in Atlanta, the former president responded to an audience member’s question about whether he would consider running again (heaven help us), answering, “I hope there’s an age limit.”

Carter continued, “If I were just 80 years old, if I was 15 years younger, I don’t believe I could undertake the duties I experienced when I was president.”

Former Vice President Joe Biden, 76, and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, 78, would both turn 80 before the end of their first term in office.

Carter’s comments come as questions regarding Biden’s age and mental acuity continue to hound his campaign.

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Similar questions plagued Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign as well, though those focused more on potential physical frailty than dotage.

According to the New York Post, Carter added, “You have to be able to go from one subject to another and concentrate on each one adequately and then put them together in a comprehensive way, like I did between Begin and Sadat with the peace agreement.”

Carter’s comments come at a pivotal time for both candidates, who have had a significant lead on the rest of the pack for months.

Though Biden has pulled ahead by a large margin, as mentioned earlier, he is struggling with the perception that his age is really beginning to show.

Should there be a presidential age limit?

Sanders has a different problem. Having led everyone save Biden for a while, Sanders is now feeling significant heat from Elizabeth Warren, who began gaining on him in mid-June.

Age is an issue the Democrats can’t simply turn a blind eye to, either.

Since the race filled out, Biden has unquestionably been the most electable Democrat — the contender with the best shot at defeating Donald Trump in the 2020 general election.

If questions about Biden’s age begin to drag him down farther, an opening may emerge for one of the trendier — but far more radical — candidates like Harris or Warren. And it’s possible that’s already happening since the RealClearPolitics average of polling data shows he has lost voters to Harris and Warren but not Sanders.

Biden falling to either woman — or any of the other obsequiously leftist candidates — would be an enormous blow to Democrats because he’s their best hope for still reaching working-class Americans.

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Biden is on the wrong side of a lot of issues and helped Barack Obama begin fundamentally transforming America, but the former vice president is far more a political opportunist than an ideologue. Electing Biden would wouldn’t be entirely dissimilar from electing an old-school Democrat — not at all what we want but probably not a fatal danger to the Republic.

Booker, Buttigieg, Harris and Warren, however, are ideologues to the nth degree. Sure they want power, but politics for them isn’t an end. It’s a means to impose Marxist ideas on the country that defeated the greatest Marxist threat of the 20th century — the Soviet Union.

The Democratic ideologues want to continue Barack Obama’s fundamental transformation of America, but voters see through much of it, responding skeptically to the ideas of single payer healthcare, compulsory government healthcare, entitlements for illegals, and open borders.

Any of the ideologues could gather a massive number of votes from America’s extreme left, but those votes wouldn’t land any of them in the White House.

Democrats have to regain the everyday Americans in flyover country that they’ve been hemorrhaging due to years of attacks on white privilege, Christianity, traditional values, and independence.

None of the ideologues will get those votes back. Biden, however, might.

But he’ll have no chance at that if the age issue drags him down.

A pleasant thought is that Carter may have just helped Republicans by kneecapping Biden.

It’s taken 38 years, but maybe America will finally be able to thank Jimmy Carter for doing something right.

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Josh Manning is deputy managing editor for assignment at The Western Journal. He holds a masters in public policy from Harvard University and has a background in higher education.
Josh Manning grew up outside of Memphis, TN and developed a love of history, politics, and government studies thanks to a life-changing history and civics teacher named Mr. McBride.

He holds an MPP from Harvard University and a BA from Lyon College, a small but distinguished liberal arts college where later in his career he served as an interim vice president.

While in school he did everything possible to confront, discomfit, and drive ivy league liberals to their knees.

After a number of years working in academe, he moved to digital journalism and opinion. Since that point, he has held various leadership positions at The Western Journal.

He's married to a gorgeous blonde who played in the 1998 NCAA women's basketball championship game, and he has two teens who hate doing dishes more than poison. He makes life possible for two boxers -- "Hank" Rearden Manning and "Tucker" Carlson Manning -- and a pitbull named Nikki Haley "Gracie" Manning.
Education
MPP from Harvard University, BA from Lyon College
Location
Phoenix, Arizona
Languages Spoken
English, tiny fragments of college French
Topics of Expertise
Writing, politics, Christianity, social media curation, higher education, firearms




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