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Shoulda let Patton go ahead and do his thing in 1945.

We enacted term limits for Presidents for the simple fact that a popular president is very hard to get out of office and thus they become very powerful.  I have no doubt that Raegan would have made a 3rd and possibly a 4th term if he was allowed.  Recall that by the mid-90's he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, and there is much talk of him showing signs when he was still in office.  I clearly remember the amount of age jokes that were said about Raegan and he was much younger than either Trump or Biden, or at least a bit younger.

This is a fair point. Until very recently Reagan was easily the oldest person to serve as President.


I looked it up, Reagan was born February 6, 1911 so he was:

• 69 when sworn in to his first term (1/20/81) and turned 70 a few weeks into that first term.
• 73 when sworn in to his second term (1/20/85) and turned 74 a few weeks into his second term.
• 77 whe he left office (1/20/89) and turned 78 a few weeks into retirement.

By comparison the two candidates last time and the leading candidates for the 2024 election are Biden who was born November 20, 1942 and Trump who was born June 14, 1946. They are/will be:

• Trump was 74 when he left office on 1/20/2021
• Biden was 78 when he took office on 1/20/2021
• Trump will be 78 at the 2025 inauguration
• Biden will be 82 at the 2025 inauguration
• Trump will be 82 at the end of the term elected in 2024
• Biden will be 86 at the end of the term elected in 2024

This issue showing up on both sides of the aisle at the same time is odd. Consider:

• Either Trump or Biden would have been the oldest person ever elected President in 2020.
• If either Trump or Biden are elected in 2024 they will be the oldest person ever elected President.
• Biden is already the oldest person to ever hold the office. 
• If Trump wins in 2024, and survives in office long enough, he will become the oldest person to ever hold the office on August 14, 2028 with a little more than five months left in the term.

We did not yet have the bomb

Probably. The course of the world would look much different today, in some shape or form.

And it would have been BLOODY.

I once read an analysis that tried to guess at how things would have gone had either side decided to go to the mats in 1945/46.

Your suggestion that it would have been BLOODY is spot on. Both sides had advantages that it would have been extraordinarily difficult for the other to overcome.

The Soviets had a substantially larger and more powerful land army. They had more experience in land warfare and a better main tank.

The United States (even before including Britain) was vastly superior both quantitatively and qualitatively in both naval and air forces. Additionally, the United States had a much better logistical capability and a LOT more oil.

The conclusion was that a quick victory would have been unlikely for either side. The attacker would have likely had significant initial success based simply on the advantage of surprise but once that faded the two sides would likely have been dragged into a bloody stalemate.

If the Russians attacked first, they'd have had great initial success with their larger army and huge numbers of T34's. Their air force, however, would have been overmatched by the B24's, B17's, B29's, Lancasters, and Halifaxes (last two assumes that Britain joins in) and while they certainly would have shot some US Bombers down, they had virtually no Strategic Air Force of their own with which to retaliate.

Furthermore, the immediate end of American Lend Lease aid would have left the Soviets with finite quantities of certain critical supplies particularly jeeps, trucks, and locomotives.  This would have created a logistical nightmare that would have been made infinitely worse by their lack of spare parts for existing US-built equipment and by US Strategic air attacks on EXTREMELY long Soviet supply lines.

The Soviets would also have had to contend with a blockade that the US and Britain would obviously have instituted and the fact that with massive numbers of carriers and carrier aircraft available the US and Britain could have launched attacks anywhere along any coast and within a few hundred miles of shore with almost no warning. This would have forced the Soviets to try to defend an enormous amount of airspace that they simply wouldn't have had enough planes to defend leaving them vulnerable to random attacks basically anywhere the US happened to decide to pounce.

US Naval Supremecy and Air Superiority would have given the US a freedom of maneuver which would have made up for much of the USSR's numerical superiority because the US would have had a much greater ability to concentrate forces.

If the US had attacked first they would have had initial success with their superior air force but as you move East from western to Central to Eastern Europe the continent gets much larger North-to-South. At roughly the Franco-German border it is only about 600 miles from the North Sea to the Mediterranean but the distance from Sevastopol to Murmansk is many times that great. As the front line gets longer, the impact of air power is necessarily diluted. It becomes more of a numbers game and . . . The Soviets had the numbers.

Additionally, as both Napoleon and Hitler learned, Russia is really, Really, REALLY big.

It isn't even necessarily clear that the Atomic Bomb would have ended the war. When the US dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki the Japanese had almost no surviving airforce, less experienced pilots, and still less fuel. Furthermore, Japan is an island nation that by that time functionally had no navy so the B29's spent very little time over enemy territory. Bombing Moscow from France or Britain is an entirely different operation and you run the risk that a shot down aircraft may result in Soviet capture of an intact bomb and potential Soviet reverse engineering of same.

Ultimately I think that the US would have prevailed simply because in 1945 US GDP was roughly 50% of Global GDP and several times greater than Soviet GDP. This would have given the US the ability to build what they needed to win but it would have been insanely bloody.

As noted, I have yet to hear a good argument from any quarter for term limits, other than "Throw the bums out!" Which you can do at the next election.

Up until very recently Ohio was a "bellwether" state meaning that the state was basically dead center nationally.  From 1964-2016 Ohio voted for the winning Presidential Candidate in all 14 Presidential elections.  Ohio did go for Nixon in 1960 but that was a VERY close election both in Ohio and Nationally so that isn't a major exception and Ohio had voted for the winners in a long string of elections prior to 1960.  The most recent exception prior to 1960 was in 1944 when Ohio voted for Dewey over Roosevelt but that can be explained by the fact that Dewey's running mate was Ohio's sitting Republican Governor.  

As such, all statewide elections in Ohio were pretty reflective of that national mood vis-a-vis the two parties.  When the R's were relatively more popular nationally they tended to do very well in Ohio and when the D's were relatively more popular nationally they tended to do very well in Ohio as well.  

Consequently, control of the Ohio Legislature and of Ohio's Congressional delegation more-or-less depended on who drew the maps*.  The D's drew the maps after the 1970 and 1980 censuses and they controlled Ohio's Legislature for most of the 1970's and 1980's.  The speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives for 20 years (1975-1994) was a Democrat named Vern Riffe.  A lot of Ohio Republicans just HATED him and supported term limits in part to get rid of him.  I always said to these people, look two things:

• If Vern Riffe is so awful, vote for someone else in his district.  
• If the real problem is that he has been speaker and his party has been the majority for 20 years, win enough districts to take that majority.  

Ohio's Republicans drew the maps after the 1990 census and won a majority in the Ohio Sate House in the 1994 elections but by then I think Term Limits had already passed.  

He was a proverbial "bum" at least according to most Ohio Republicans per your quote above and he DID get thrown out but even if you think that he WAS a bum, IMHO, a whole lot of baby got thrown out with the bathwater.  


*Ohio's State House of Representatives composition:

• Republicans first took control of the HoR shortly prior to the Civil War.  They then controlled the HoR nearly continuously all the way through 1910.  Note that Democrats did occasionally take over during that time but they never held on for more than two years (one cycle).  
• Democrats must have drawn the maps after the 1910 census because they controlled the HoR for the bulk of the teens.  
• Republicans must have drawn maps after the 1920 census and they maintained control (with a few two year exceptions) from the 1920's all the way up until the 1972 election.  
• Democrats drew the maps after the 1970 and 1980 elections and controlled the house consecutively all the way from 1973 through 1994 (it took Republicans two election cycles to regain control after drawing the post-1990 census maps).  
• After 22 years of Democratic control, Republicans retook control after the 1994 election and have held the Ohio HoR ever since except for one election cycle (2009-2010 where Democrats had a 53-46 majority from the 2008 election).  

I saw replicas of Fat Man and Little Boy at the museum in Los Alamos. 
.
One of those per month, every month, would eventually eliminate any country's will to fight.

Without getting too deep into it, I think there was more willingness to drop a bomb on the Japanese than there would be on Europeans.

You know, prevailing attitudes of the time, and all...

Absolutely there was.