After Fiorino’s rise in the polls, the top three are now all candidates with no governmental experience.
Never in the history of this country have we had a president with no such experience. Before you bring up Hoover, Grant, or Eisenhower: the military is certainly part of the government, and those two generals had extensive experience consulting with presidents to make decisions of the most grave national import. And Herbert Hoover was a cabinet secretary, also working alongside the president on a regular basis.
So the party that claims to value tradition seems determined to throw out this tradition and roll the dice with someone who has no relevant experience to the job. It’s insane.
Years ago, I was *forced *to take a leadership and management class (seriously - I never wanted to be a manager) and one of the points it made was that a manager doesn’t need to know anything about what is being managed - people are people. So whether it’s a bakery or an auto manufacturing plant or a university, a good manager could handle any of them.
Personally, I thought that was a load of crap. On the other hand, the government is so convoluted in so many ways (thinking specifically of rules and regs and practices) would it really be such a bad idea to bring in an outsider to point such things out and fix them?
Not to say that any of the current crop are even remotely capable of this, but maybe the government is a paradigm that needs to be shifted to a better model. And I say this as one who spent 37 years working for the Dept of Defense, so I know some of the insanity of the system.
It would probably be better to select presidents and most other politicians by a random draw system among the general public, something like jury duty. A lottery. Spin the bottle. Anything but voting to select one of the proffered representatives of entrenched power.
It is funny though, since Republicans attacked Obama so much for being inexperienced and unqualified.
Last I checked, being qualified for the highest office in the land was not the same as meeting the minimum legal requirements. There are hundreds of millions of people who could meet those requirements, and since only one person can be president every four years, a higher level of qualification seems prudent. And for well over two centuries, that is the standard we have been using. But sure: let’s just throw that out at the same time as the job has become more complex than ever before.
ETA: Marshmallow, your suggestion strikes me as an incredibly ill-advised one. A truly frightening prospect.
Experience is important, but I don’t get the sense that even the informed voters know what experience is helpful and what is useless, so does it really matter? I dare say that electing a career legislator to an executive office is as useless as electing a beekeeper to the office. A lot of people that really should know better seem to think that “government experience” is all equivalent, and that private sector experience, even using skills that are directly applicable to being an executive, aren’t nearly as useful.
Carly Fiorina and Donald Trump are clearly more experienced than Marco Rubio, but I bet most voters would give Rubio the edge in that department, incorrectly, in my view.
The problem with Fiorina and Trump are that their experience is mostly bad. Carson has little experience, although he did manage to get a few dozen surgeons to work together to make medical history, so he’s not without proven leadership skills. I’d certainly rank him ahead of Rand Paul. He’s a better doctor than Paul, and it’s not as if Paul’s 4 years in the Senate has made him ready to step into the Oval Office.
What’s more frightening is that we’re not holding the President responsible for failures in his own administration, yet we’re rushing to give credit or blame for things he can’t control, like gas prices. Our democracy will not survive if we expect our Presidents to keep the price of gas down and the stock market high, but believe that making sure his own executive agencies run well is too much to ask of one man. It’s astonishingly ignorant, yet again, many very intelligent people actually think this way.
Those things that are convoluted—especially the things mandated by law—can’t be fixed by an outsider pointing them out (as if the people who are there have never noticed them). And elected officials and their appointees have the least incentive to get things right, because they are short-timers.
Most things are convoluted because Congress—not government employees—are obsessed with making it look like they’re being tough on bureaucrats, so they slap on endless layers of “accountability” and threaten employees at every turn. Under those circumstances of course they’re going to hew to the rules and stay in CYA mode.
Jesus. Am I really the only one who finds this a horrendous scenario to contemplate? Just take some random member of the hoi polloi and hand them the launch codes?!?
Might I suggest that we wait until the nominating process is actually over before drawing conclusions? Not even one vote has been cast yet, and won’t be for a few months.
Not only is Rubio clearly more experienced than Fiorina, but I’m more experienced than her, too. I’ve had the experience of increasing the value of business ventures I’ve been involved with. She hasn’t.
It’s absolutely a load of crap. It’s only true if you’re talking about a human resources manager, which is not surprising since most of those stupid courses are generic crap developed by generic HR types. In the real world, a truly successful business manager always has a deep and intimate understanding of the business – or else he’s just damn lucky, and luck alone won’t take you far.
And that goes double for setting public policy, where you need an almost superhuman skill to be able to separate the fundamentally important from the superficial, and to know what is achievable and what isn’t, and where to conduct your battles. And when we speak of the current crop of dunderheads being “unqualified”, I think it’s fair to say that these idiots can’t even fathom the right questions, let alone the answers. I mean seriously, The Donald is the front runner? Carly Fiorina, who single-handedly almost destroyed a storied tech company, is polling at #2 in the quest to run the nation? It’s scary!
At this time in the last election cycle, it was Rick Perry by a landslide. Where was he when it came time to vote? I think we’ll be asking the same about the current top three in about the same time frame.
This is shortsighted. It’s not like Fiorina woke up one day and was CEO of HP. She spent years working her way up the corporate ladder, arguably performing better than her peers. Your statement is also factually incorrect. From her wiki(section prior to HP):
I’m no fan of Fiorina, but it’s wrong to say she’s never increased the value of a business venture.
I personally would prefer an inexperienced person who has the right policy positions over an experienced person with the wrong policy positions. (the inexperienced person can hire experienced people to do everything which needs to be done–from engaging in foreign policy to designing anti-poverty programs)
But the first question which needs to asked here is exactly what does the President need to be able to do?