Career Politicians

For a good number of election cycles, the term "career politician" has indicated somebody who is on the bottom rung of life's ladder. A career politician never held a "real job." never produced anything of value, and never gained any experience in the real world. It was the biggest, by far, knock on Barack Obama. He was mocked as the community organizer who had never had a real job. He'd never been a manager. He'd never been an executive. Worst of all, he'd never run a business. He'd never met a payroll and he never lost sleep worrying about not meeting one. He was a career politician. And he won.

I think the first time this notion struck our collective fancy, was 1992. A billionaire Texan spent an hour or so talking to Larry King on CNN, and suddenly everybody was enthralled with the idea of letting a non-politician take a swipe at it. "Let's a businessman run it like a business!" became the cry, and a permanent lane was created for the non-politician. Ever since then, there has been one lurking around the edges of every primary. Their main appeal is that  they are NOT a politician. The idea of an outsider coming in to clean house sounded so good. In fact, it sounded so good that people forgot why we even had professional politicians. I mean, what good were they? What skills did they have, other than skillfully lying  to us?

The answer is so obvious that is makes me feel stupid now. Their skill is getting elected.

And make no mistake, it is a skill. It is a skill to be able to debate a point without loosing your cool. It's a skill to deflect criticism, without seeming to dodge the question. And yes, it's a skill to lie the right way, and to an acceptable degree. It's a skill to charm those with whom you disagree slightly, and to not appear to be mean when you disagree wholly. It is a skill to be gracious, either in victory or defeat. It is a skill to win the support of opponents you have defeated.

Oddly these are the skills that people say they despise in career politicians. They are also the skills that win elections. If you were to make a list of those people who best exemplified these skills, it would have Obama, Bill Clinton, G.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, JFK, LBJ, FDR and Richard Nixon topping the list. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump would be nowhere to be found on that list.

Following Trump's epic defeat this November, I predict a new found appreciation for the skills of career politicians.