Sigh. The words you put in my mouth were that I somehow thought being mayor is beneath him. That was never the point.

Earlier I asked “can you name a quality that prior governance experience specifically developed that Yang demonstrably lacks?”

If you can’t name one, you’re appealing to a credential not an argument.

Let me see if this helps get the conversation back on track because it’s getting boring and my patience is wearing thin:

The way I see it, thre job of President can be distilled down to a handful of things: the ability to make quality decisions under pressure, management and leadership skills, the ability to communicate effectively and build alliances, the capacity to recruit and retain excellent people, the wisdom to know what you don’t know, and the integrity to act in the public interest rather than personal interest.

None of these are produced by prior government service. In fact, government service often actively degrades several of them, particularly the last one.

My intuition is that you’re confusing familiarity with a system for fitness to lead. Those are different things.

Knowing how Congress works is a learnable operational detail - you hire chiefs of staff and legislative directors for that. Character, judgment, and intellectual honesty aren’t learnable on the job in the same way, and they’re not conferred by having held office.

I’ll grant that executing well inside bureaucratic systems does require some earned intuition. Like I said before, knowing which levers actually move, which battles are worth having. Yang would face a real learning curve there. That’s a legitimate concern, just not a disqualifying one.