so why stick around? There are very few jobs I can imagine wanting to do until the day I die.

My guess is that it's the sweetest gig imaginable where everything is done by your army of staffers and interns and people immediately surrounding you do nothing but kiss your ass. You just have to occasionally sign a bunch of tl;dr document and appear in the public every once in a while. And they're still getting paid even when Congress is not in session.

I have to hypotheses:

1. Boomers in the west think retiring is “dishonorable” and should never retire under any circumstances.

2. The whole point is so no one else can have it, they can do fuck all in office but the point is playing keep away from others.

Their job is to sit in meetings and have people speak at them, before they do whatever they want with zero mechanic for accountability. Like, if you're even the least bit sentient, why the fuck would you not stick around in that job for as long as humanly (or inhumanly) possible? It's not like the Democratic Party is trying to actually effect change, so why shouldn't the party just be a mechanism for self-righteous fossils to feel important.