Why are presidents elected?
 

Most other positions of leadership: military, judicial, corporate, etc, are all promoted or appointed.
What sets the president apart from those leadership roles? Why should we not "elect" our military commanders? Is it that the head of armed forces needs specific skills honed through years of experience while the head of a government ... can be Joe Blow?

This just ran through my head, and I figured it'd spark an interesting discussion.

The next president can't be Joe Blow. There are credentials and restrictions to run for the presidency.

And, exactly, military officials are promoted based on experience and proven track records. Why should everyday people be the judge of how well they command troops? It's a different situation from the presidency...since the president doesn't necessarily make the contributions to doctrine (experts do, regardless of who the figurehead is. At least one would hope so)

If Joe Blow is a natural born citizen, at least 35 years old and has been a resident in the United States for 14 years, Joe Blow can be president.

So long as he's Christian and doesn't support gay marriage.

What kind of things does a president do? Is there any kind of specialized training necessary to perform those duties?

Because if there are duties, then those who put him to do that job ought to be aware and knowledgeable of those duties so that they can place the best possible candidate.

I'm trying to say, the average person doesn't know the president's job, and hence can't choose a proper candidate for the job. And since it's such an important position, it shouldn't be left around willy-nilly like that.

He can be black, though.

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y16...ack-attack.jpg

Hmmm why don't we vote on military officials maybe it's because the average voter doesn't know shit about the military especially with regard to the qualities of every piece of shit general and colonel in the forces.

This would've been a better thread if you asked why we don't appoint a president like parliamentary governments appoint a prime minister.

And that is why the president is ulimately not chosen by the hundreds of millions of voters in the country, but by 538 electors.

You're asking why a republic elects its head of state. It's just how the system works. Someone has to decide who does the job, and since there's no higher office, you don't have a higher-up appoint one.

I dunno. "Blow" sounds like one'a them dern Jew names. Won't vote for them types.

This is a Christian nation.

In God We Trust. It don't say Moses or whoever it is you believe in. This is America

Killed Christ.

I (depending on the day) have the somewhat cynical belief that the founding cornerstone of America is not democracy, but capitalism. I'm pretty sure that I'm not the only one who has noticed that recently, not long before the economic crisis began, Americans began to notice that they were too far in debt and started saving money and reigning in their spending to avoid going broke. However, when the country's economy is based on people spending money they do not have, you will run into problems.

Democracy exists to allow people to feel that they are a part of running their country. But what happens to those in the minority? They are often left behind, run over by their own neighbors. Democracy is by nature the rule of the majority. What about the over 40% of Americans who voted for McCain? They certainly have a right to more seats in the house than the republicans got.

But after all of this I admit that was quite a rant. I'm sorry, but that's how I feel about the American electoral system.

(Just for the record, I am not American, I am Canadian. And in feel much the same way about all of this here, our electoral system is quite similar)

I find that the military is a chain of command that in order to prove your worth to become a leader, you need be a follower, There is a stringent set of rules and standards within the military that requires experience in order to lead. In the military, respect is earned in a more direct sense than that of becoming a President (In the U.S.) The roles are different as well. In the military, civil issues are not the issue, while in politics, it is civil.

I think that the military has to be this way because it isn't trying to make people think, it is instead trying to show how the strong and the brave can lead. It promotes this to create strong soldiers because it gives them the belief that they will be rewarded for being a hero and giving it your all.

My theory is extremely cynical, but at least in the US the government and general public are both being overrun by idiots who couldn't figure out how to do something good without regards to profit if their life depended on it. If you pool two groups that by majority are idiots you either A) get an idiot result which would happen whether one side acted alone or both sides acted together, or B) Somehow the non-idiots on both sides manage to find each other and something good finally gets done.

Also: Must be of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant descent, must have attended Yale, Princeton or Harvard University, and absolutely, under any circumstances, cannot have a vagina.

You may point to Obama as an exception to many of these rules, but history will ultimately show that he was a burp in the universe.

Also, it has never been explicitly proven that he doesn't have a vagina, so we don't know how many of these rules Obama has accidentally broken.

But no worries, the universe always seeks equilibrium, so it's a basic inevitability that the next president of the United States will be Jerry Falwell, by means of overcompensation.

Unless zombies are part of Constitutional eligibility (of course there is no specific clause against them, so there is still interpretation for that), I'm afraid Fallwell is out of the running.

Joe the Plumber would make a decent replacement, in the meantime.

If Hollywood is any indication, the zombie revolution is due nigh anyhow, so once they are a populous majority, Falwell is a shoe-in.

The universe seeks equilibrium always; the end justifies the means.

Untrue. The limitation for any man (dead or living is not specifically stated) is two terms. Reagan has already served his maximum and is now ineligible for the Presidency.

I think some here are confusing a "military official" with a "commander-in-chief." Your President is technically C-In-C, but hardly in a military-technical role. He makes decisions at a very high level and really does not need to know too much about their implementation. The Cuban Missile Crisis was an exception, but in the game of nuclear escalation, every military act is a political one anyhow.

Way to ruin a perfectly serviceable discussion about zombie leadership.

Hold the train up.

We're precluding the idea that living Americans would find a zombie candidate tenable, but as we've seen with the election of President Obama, this sort of comfort level may take a long time to reach.

We may have to endure some things like a Zombie Dred Scott decision, or even a "Three Fifths Clause" for zombies, which may just as well be true, because they could literally be three fifths of a person at some state in time.

It will culminate with a "I Have a Braaaaaains" speech at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. And then, then they will be free.

It's unclear as to whether the DNA of a zombie has been altered from its original, living incarnation, so we cannot precisely state whether it is the same man in scientific terms.

However, dead or alive, it still has the same Social Security Number, so I do think that's enough of a barrier to attaining a third presidency. By bureaucratic standards - scientific standards don't typically apply in government law - it's still the same person, regardless of its live or dead status.