Promoting no experience

 

Florida, where I live, has at least two candidates running for state-wide office that advertise themselves as political outsiders.

One is running for governor, the other for the US senate.

Both claim successful business backgrounds and both promise to make changes in government.

Trouble is, neither can accomplish what they promise.

The only way an outsider can force changes in government is if many other like-minded outsiders are elected at the same time.

One person, be that person a governor or a senator, might influence others, but that person alone can't bring about change.

Florida has had some good governors in the past - it's also had its share of "less good" chief executives. But no matter what the governor wants, the state's house and senate still can override the governor's desires. True, a governor can veto a house/senate bill, but the same house and senate can override the veto.

There are, at last count, 100 members of the US senate. Try and get 51 senators to agree on any one bit of legislative action - without adding unrelated "amendments" to a bill.

The last US president who had great success with congress was LBJ. Lyndon Baines Johnson was for many years in the US senate; he knew "where the bodies were buried"; he knew his peers' secrets and he knew how to "play politics."

Outsiders, political innocents, may be very skilled at running a business, and certainly we need such people in office to reign in the professional politicians, but there is a big difference between running a business and running a government.

It's one thing to be an 800 pound gorilla in a private business. It's another entirely to be 1/100th of a political body - that gorilla quickly shrinks to an ant of less than a gram. (OK, truth in blogging; I've never weighed gorillas or ants.)

As much as I would like to see government run as a business, I think I'll have to stay with the insider and hope that I, and others of similar convictions, can influence that person to work toward government-as-business.

Yohanon Glenn
Yohanon.Glenn at gmail dot com