All the news stories about yesterday's entrants into the Republican presidential field, Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson, mention they are extremely unlikely to win. Yet the fact that they decided to run at all, and that many in their party will consider them carefully and give them money and attention, testifies to an ongoing delusion, not only among Republicans but among many in the press, as well. It says that the notion that someone with no experience in government should be taken seriously as a contender for the most important job in government is something other than absurd.
Ben Carson was an excellent doctor, and Carly Fiorina certainly knows a lot about the profit potential of printer cartridges (even if her tenure as CEO of HP was something of a disaster). But neither of them has ever held elective office, or any position at all in government at any level. Yet we accept that they could step into an entirely unfamiliar environment and operate with at least some level of competence. It isn't that they won't be asked about their lack of government experience, because they will (and already have been). But when they and other amateur politicians answer that what really matters is vague things like "judgment" and "values," we accept the answer as good enough and move on.
But do you know how many of America's 44 presidents arrived at that office without extensive government experience? Zero. Not a one. Not counting George Washington, only five had held no elected office before becoming president. Like Washington, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses Grant, and Dwight Eisenhower were generals, meaning that they spent their careers in the employ of the federal government and had years to learn its ways from the inside. William Howard Taft and Herbert Hoover had been cabinet secretaries. Every other president had been a member of Congress or a governor.
Of course, some of them were excellent presidents and some were terrible. But the ones revered by both Democrats and Republicans came to the job with lengthy preparation. Ronald Reagan was governor of our largest state for eight years, and finally made it to the White House after his third presidential run. Franklin Roosevelt was assistant secretary of the Navy and then governor of New York.
While the attraction to amateur politicians exists in both parties, it's much more intense on the Republican side. There are a few Democrats here and there who come to high office having never run for anything before-the occasional rich guy (like former Minnesota senator Herb Kohl) or celebrity (the current Minnesota senator Al Franken). But Republicans positively ache for the outsider who will come to Washington and use his common sense and familiarity with the "real world" to clean house and fix everything that's wrong. That's partly because many of those amateurs come from the business world, and Republicans tend to view successful businesspeople as the most admirable among us, their intellect, competence, and virtue proven by the size of their bank accounts. But it's also because Republicans are the party that despises government, so it's only natural that they would believe that the most noble and talented people can be found outside it.
The reason that outsider politicians usually fail in their bids for lower offices, and always fail when trying to get elected president, isn't so much that the voters realize that governing is hard and so they shouldn't elect someone who has never done it before. It's that running for office is also hard, and like anything else, doing it well takes experience and knowledge. It also takes things that are built up over time, which candidates like Fiorina and Carson don't have, like networks of allies for whom you've done favors, relationships with other politicians that can produce endorsements, and so on. But it also takes something else: practice. If you do it for the first time on the biggest possible stage with the most scrutiny and the highest stakes, chances are you aren't going to be very good at it, no matter how smart you are. Which is what saves us from having an amateur actually get to the White House.
