"I'm not one of those cocktail party circuit politicians"
"I'm going to protect your Second Amendment"
"We need someone who represents real [fill in your state]"
"I'll never support socialism"
What do all of those quotes have in common? They're all quotes from people running for public office. What does any of it mean? Just about nothing. So why do we keep hearing those kind of quotes? Because people don't really want to think, and any specifics about what kind of policies a candidate will support bores most voters. What we end up with is vague platitudes, irrelevant "brave" stances, and elected officials who have no idea how anything works. It's how in Nebraska we end up electing Republicans year after year because most Nebraskans are convinced that the Democrats are socialists and we're against socialism even though we're not sure what specific proposals are socialistic and why they're bad. It's not a whole lot better in "blue" states. And it's not just that voters don't want to think, it's candidates who don't understand how governing works. We get candidates who believe that because they ran a business they can be a successful governor or senator; or because they're a "typical" [fill in your state] then they'd be up for the challenge of legislating. This doesn't mean that someone who was a bartender or an optometrist, or a restaurateur, or even a CEO can't be an effective legislator or governor or president, just that being a CEO or a regular Joe are not qualifications in and of themselves.
Naïve and inexperienced people getting elected don't end up changing the institution, they end up, due to their inexperience, being led by the old hands who have been there for decades. There is a process to lawmaking. I've said before that I'd support a requirement that elected officials have some experience. Senator shouldn't be an entry-level job (nor should the presidency for that matter). I don't like Senator Deb Fischer, but she at least had some experience in our state legislature before running for Senate (not that she's done anything but toe the party line since her election). Mike Johanns was a county board member, city councilman, Lincoln Mayor, and governor before he was a senator. George W Bush and Bill Clinton were governors before being elected president. You can disagree with their policies, but they knew the process, they understood how things worked.
But these inexperienced people get elected, and because they were elected by people who didn't think about their choice, they're forced to continue to govern, using the term loosely, by demagoguery, or as I've said before, by urban legend. We get Nebraska legislators posturing about gun rights, even though there are no efforts in the Unicameral to restrict gun ownership. We get members of the House of Representatives and the Senate spending their time propping up insane conspiracy theories instead of attempting to solve our country's many problems.
Maybe before the next election we ask the candidates to be a bit more specific than "I'll fight for you".
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