The Party of Dave
…the notion that it would be okay for high-ranking public officials to have no better understanding of policy issues than does the average person is bizarre. When you get someone to fix your car, you want that person to know more about fixing cars than do most people. Houses are designed by architects and actually put together by a whole bunch of specialists — plumbers, electricians, carpenters, etc. — who know more about what they’re doing than do most people. That doesn’t mean the building trades are dominated by a shadowy elite that the rest of us need to overthrow, it just reflects the benefits of the division of labor. There’s no need for politics to be totally controlled by some narrow cabal of credentialed experts, but at a minimum it would be nice for policymakers to be people who’ve been paying attention to policy debates.
Agreed. In choosing Palin for crass populist reasons and trumpeting her “everyman” qualities, the Republicans are becoming the Party of Dave. It’s sad.