I had to laugh…

Columnist Nicholas Goldberg, writing in the LA Times, has opined that we are seeing a rash of folks running for office that have no previous political experience. He blames this on the previous administration’s influx of ‘citizen’ politicians and seems horrified that this will bring our government to its knees with all these amateurs running around loose in statehouses and in Washington DC.

The problem with professional politicians is just that, they are professional. They are doing the job to make a living but there is no seeming recourse if they fail. You can list hundreds of politicians of all parties that have been in office for years and the problems that they came into office to fix are not only still in place, but are worse.

It isn’t that they are incompetent, but that they have, after a couple of years, tasted power and love it. They want to retain that power and to do so they must raise money, a lot of money. That comes from people who are attempting to buy favors and often do. Then decisions which should be common sense are replaced with decisions that mean money in the campaign coffers of the folks making those decisions.

I wish I could be like Nicholas and point the finger at one group or another and wring my hands ‘if only’ the electorate were smarter and elected those that believe or vote like I do, all would be right with the world. But dammit, I can’t. Both sides are equally bad. And the electorate is smarter than you think.

If that wasn’t the case, why does the political pendulum swing back and forth so often. We elect folks from one side of the political spectrum and then just four or eight years later we vote the bastards out and the pendulum swings back to the other side. One year we elect Ronald Reagan, a few years later Bill Clinton, then George Bush, then Barack Obama, then Donald Trump and then Joe Biden. The voters moved back and forth. Usually electing a congress of the other party to ensure that no one gets carried away.

Nick thinks that folks should start out in school boards and city councils and get some experience at a ‘low level’ before jumping into state legislatures and the congress. I look at things from the opposite point of view. I think that school boards and city councils may be the most important with the value of the position decreasing as the office gets further and further away from home.

Schools, police, streets and parks, fire protection, hospitals, delivering electricity and water, ensuring building codes are met, all seem to me to be more important to the average person than mandating the kind of car you can drive or spending trillions on programs that have proven to have no measurable effect on anything. But that’s just me.

Nicholas Goldberg picked half a dozen examples of amateurs that are running for office including Matthew McConaughey, Andrew Yang, Caitlyn Jenner, Andrew Guiliani, and spent half the column bemoaning Guiliani’s (he’s Rudy’s son) running for Governor of New York. I’m guessing there are hundreds if not thousands running for office who have the vast experience of Andrew (mostly on the golf course) and would probably be OK.

I realize that high powered columnists for the main stream media know more than backwater bloggers like me and are probably right in their opinions. But I I can’t get past the William F. Buckley quote when he said that he would “rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.” Smart guy, Bill.

JVH