Until we allow that not every candidate need be a polished career politician we’ll almost certainly get nothing but polished career politicians to choose from.
And as that equation is the very way the status quo perpetuates itself, it’s fair to assume that those making such demands of our candidates by default also support the status quo.
Out of habit or fear of change, is my guess. Which doesn’t make it any less sad.
‘Lyndon was running about 10 points behind, with only nine days to go… He was sunk in despair. He was desperate… he called his equally depressed campaign manager and instructed him to call a press conference at two or two-thirty ( just after lunch on a slow news day) and accuse his high-riding opponent (the pig farmer) of having routine carnal knowledge of his barnyard sows, despite the pleas of his wife and children… His campaign manager was shocked. ‘We can’t say that, Lyndon,’ he said. ‘It’s not true.’ ‘Of course it’s not,’ Johnson barked at him, ‘but let’s make the bastard deny it.’
–Better than sex: confessions of a political junkie trapped like a rat in Mr. Bill’s neighborhood, by Hunter S. Thompson.
What’s funny about that book is that it detailed in sordid fashion the Clinton machine, and how ruthless he was with both women and winning. Which of course, reminds me how the media ignored Edwards with a love child while he was running for VP. Or the way even Stewart at the Daily Show pimped for Weiner. Or ignored Barney or Teddy or -jesus it’s just terrible.
The double standard is DEAFENING with this no matter what Cain has done.
Cain hasn’t done anything until somebody produces a credible witness with sufficient evidence to the contrary.
Mostly habit and deference to “expertise.”
People hear those who call the horse-races pick apart every statement, every move, every pause, every bit of intonation, and evaluate how well something was “handled.”
All day, every day, because that’s easier than vetting someone’s record or researching the viability of this policy or that.
BECAUSE OF THE OPTICS!
What Cain can do is raise his own political game, lift his rhetoric along with his appeal to the principles he represents — to the extent I believe he represents Tea Party political sentiment, hence fundamentally exceptional or uniquely American political thought. His message has been fine thus far, though I think somewhat clouded for people who don’t already think in the terms in which he thinks; so for those who don’t know how that goes, I think he needs to detail the embedded meaning of the American frame of government in returning taxation to intelligibility, for instance, doing what would amount to an exegetical rendering of his own proposals.
Either that, sdferr, or he could just ANSWER THE CHARGES!
WHY WON”T HE ANSWER THE CHARGES!
UNQUALIFIED! UNQUALIFIED! UNQUALIFIED!
heh
I met with the chief engineer of a big hotel down town yesterday. We hadn’t spoken in about a year or so. Out of nowhere, he told me that having met Herman a whole lot, cause he’s in the hospitality business, that Herman needed to hold a press conference and tell everybody to go to hell, get on a private jet and leave the idiot American public to their toys. Then he told me to vote for Newt, cause everything is already out on him. Leaving aside the fact that I thought he was whole lot shrewder than that, I told him, I didn’t really give a fuck anymore, he asked me why, I told him, then he said, yeah he wouldn’t give a fuck either.
Have a nice day.
Driving into work this morning, on Xm 88 Ross Tucker and Solomon Wilcots argued with a caller about the distinction between winning as your primary goal and winning championships as your primary goal. I think that’s kind of relevant here.
“Career” politicians should be hung. Pour l’encourgament de l’autres.
Quarterbacks win games. GM’s win championships.
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Until we allow that not every candidate need be a polished career politician we’ll almost certainly get nothing but polished career politicians to choose from.
The real trick, I’m coming to believe, is finding some candidates that can sell this message. I fear it will require the rarest of talent: the master of the political game, who knows the system so well that he transcends it. It will be fantastically difficult to pull off. The candidate would need to be able to fence with the usual talking heads, showing them for what they are in a manner that seems good-natured, rather than self-serving or combative.
One can imagine how hard it would be to sell something like, “I understand that you’re deeply interested in my private life, but my private life is private, and I’d appreciate it if you’d respect my privacy the way you’ve long claimed to respect the privacy of candidates you personally support. If you can cover for John Edwards and his secret love child, or ignore Nancy Pelosi bailing out her husband’s bank, or whitewash Obama’s history of hanging around with radicals, there’s no reason you can’t show me the same consideration.” The pushback from the talking heads would be fairly aggressive; you’d have to make it clear that you understood their game, and you refused to acknowledge its legitimacy. But you’d also have to make it clear that you were above it all, and were actually enjoying yourself.
When the skeletons inevitably came to light, you’d need to be almost sociopathic about their insignificance: “Yeah, it’s true that I lied on my resume to start my career, but if you look at my performance since then, I think it’s obvious that I wasn’t lying about my skills and talents. At any rate, the last guy spent his formative years smoking dope and hanging out with Marxist revolutionaries, bomb-builders, and racist anti-American preachers, and you guys didn’t think any of that was even worth a mention. I’m starting to think maybe you guys are a lot more interested in the sordid details of my past than you’d be if I supported teacher’s unions and socialized medicine. So how ’bout if you all pretend that I totally support all the stupid, destructive, counterproductive policies that have been destroying our country over the past 50 years, and cut me some effin’ slack?”
I fear that before such a magnificent bastard comes to the fore, our battered Republic will collapse under the weight of its accumulated bureaucracy. Still, a man can dream…
I would grab a nightstick and intimidate people at polling stations for that guy, Squid. I’d pay people with crack to vote for him. I’d make sure every corpse in my state was behind him. I’d extort money from unwitting workers to fund his campaign. I’d go full Democrat for a guy like that.
Let’s head down to the basement, Pablo, put bras on our heads, fire up the computers and see if we can’t create the candidate of our dreams.
If Sarah Palin appears in your shower, you better hope she turns Todd into a Jabba the Hut newt for the duration. Just sayin…