Ok, I agree with the high bit here, which is that governors may be expected to possess some implementation experience that legislators would not, even if you do misunderstand the oversight role that Senators in particular have and make some unsupported specific statements about LBJ. But that aside, wouldn’t you think there’d be some weighing of domain experience against executive experience? You seem to put 100% of your chips on the latter, which is complete nonsense.
Knowing about things is not as good as doing things, and doing things is not as good as being responsible for things. that’s why no one ever hired Bill James or Nate Silver to manage their baseball team.
Then it must be distressing to see the governor candidates dropping out first. Paging Bobby Jindal, paging Chris Christie…
I always think what adaher says creates ripples in time and space as the universe changes stuff around to demonstrate him wrong, right Governor Walker?
How about doing completely different things, like governors vs. presidents?
Except for foreign policy it’s not different. Governors deal with legislatures, implement programs, and are accountable for what happens in their administration, not to mention their state’s overall performance on issues like the economy, crime, and education. Senators are not held accountable for anything individually except in rare cases. As a matter of fact, they are experts in avoiding accountability.
It’s true that a Senator has more experience with national issues, but so do the best journalists and policy experts. So instead of looking in the phone book, maybe we should just pick someone randomly from the Brooking Institution? Why wouldn’t that work? The reasons are obvious: people who know things can’t necessarily do things.
I guess it depends on what you think the most important problems facing the country are. If you think the problem is that we need new legislation, then I guess a legislative expert is a great thing. But if you think the primary problem is that the government is failing to successfully implement the programs it already runs, then a governor with a proven record of success in that field would be nice.
For example, shouldn’t we agree that fixing the VA should be one of the highest priorities, and that the VA’s issues are primarily due to piss poor management? Who is more likely to fix something like that, a career legislator who has never run anything bigger than a staff, or a governor who has successfully reformed and improved the performance of state agencies?
Why are things like this still appearing in the media a year later?
I remember Bill Maher used to read the paper to GWB because he joked he didn’t read the newspaper. Bill might want to bring that one back for the next year and a half, because someone is really disconnected from what’s going on.
No. A priority, but nowhere near to making the top 20. We have many much more important national problems.
Even so, proving you can fix broken agencies is a necessary prerequisite for attempting grand new programs.
Cite?
I would think that logic of that statement is self-evident. Do you normally buy ice cream when your fridge doesn’t work?
Most of this country’s broken agencies, we know exactly what’s broken with them, and how to fix them. What’s broken about them is that their funding has been gutted by Republican legislators determined to make government fail. The solution to that problem isn’t better management; it’s getting the funding back up to what it should be. Which is a legislative problem.
Ah yes, a culture of retaliation against whistleblowers and allowing serious misconduct are symptoms of lack of funding.
I guess that’s what our police departments need too? If only they had more funding they wouldn’t kill so many young black men?
I can trot out my proposal for selecting governments by performance on a football pitch, if anyone likes.
That’s not managing a baseball team. Or being general manager either.
What James and Silver have done is made a lot of very good statistical arguments that were tried, often successfully, by managers and general managers(Billy Beane being the most famous example). It is still nowhere near the same as actually running a team.
And now the candidate they had with governing experience, a very conservative record, and in my view the best chance to win against the Democrats, has dropped out after he dropped to less than one half of 1% in the CNN poll. Republicans are plooking very foolish right now.
Can’t disagree with that.
Meanwhile, Bush is channeling Clinton by claiming that his name=experience:
“I know how to do this because, yes, I am a Bush.”
Shit. What the fuck is “plooking”? Missed the edit window. Sigh.