04-07-2021, 04:58 PM
(04-07-2021, 03:41 PM)fredtoast Wrote: I have never understood the problem with "career politicians".
In ever other job people value experience. Everyone would pick a heart surgeon with 15 years experience over a guy who just did it for a year.
Also politicians have to make the voters happy to become "career politicians". I don't know why so many people think we need to get rid of elected officials who are making the voters happy.
To be a career politician you must get re-elected, to get re-elected you need large sums of money, to get large sums of money you need to get the backing of corporate lobbyists, and to get the backing of corporate lobbyists you must assist in passing legislation that looks out for those lobbyists interests sometimes as they are directly counter to their own constituents desires or best interests.
Now you will probably say, but isn't that their constituent's jobs to vote them out then? The answer is yes, but it isn't that easy. Nobody is reading 900-page bills, not even the politicians, and so what you get are a bunch of favors slipped in under pages and pages of words people can't possibly sift through to find and expose them. Even still, what happens when they are found out is that the general public is really too dumb to know they have been sold out. We know that people, in general, are not all that intelligent and if you mutter enough buzz words they will forget that they were sold out in favor of getting their pitchforks out to go after a "real" enemy.
Also, you are then the incumbent at some point and that is often too difficult or expensive to unseat. We have seen it many times over, a politician who is rarely even in their area they represent sticking around far too long based on name recognition and national sentiment that trickles back to voting for or against your party in an outdated two-party system.
As for the experience, did the heart surgeon require a basic understanding of his field to get the job first? He probably had to go to school right? Does the heart surgeon have people who try to sway his decision-making with money? Does the surgeon sacrifice some people for others based on their ideological beliefs? A surgeon that is horrible and still has his license 15 years later doesn't make him competent just because he still has his license, I know that from experience. We see this with LEO all the time, after they do something wrong the first thing you see in the press release is their time of service as if that means they couldn't possibly be awful at that job all along.
I guess this is a long-drawn-out way of saying the system is pretty damn broken, and while career politicians aren't the only problem they are most definitely part of the problem. If we could somehow remove lobbyists and dark money out of politics I would have no issues with it all, but my biggest problem is that money wins an election, and often times those who can get the money to keep coming back sold out the public a long time ago.
