Posted on 10/27/2011 5:59:04 AM PDT by Kaslin
At the moment, national polls show Herman Cain leading or tied for the lead in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. This, despite the fact that he has never won an election, has never held public office (except on a regional Federal Reserve advisory panel), and has shown prodigious ignorance on some important foreign policy and domestic issues.
We in the punditocracy have been attributing Cain's lead to many conservatives' resistance to frequent frontrunner Mitt Romney. Many have described Cain as the flavor of the month and have predicted his numbers will collapse, as Michele Bachmann's and Rick Perry's have.
Reasonable analysis, as far as it goes. But I think Cain's current lead is evidence of a larger and longer-range trend that is both heartening and disturbing.
I call it the revolt against the experts.
It has been going on for a long time. In the years after World War II, when pollsters first started testing confidence in leaders and institutions, mid-century Americans expressed great confidence and respect for experts and those at the head of large organizations.
This was an unsurprising result, since the leaders of big government, big business and big labor had produced a glorious victory in World War II and then seemed to produce postwar prosperity when almost everyone expected a return to depression.
Confidence in leaders and respect for expertise fell in the years that gave us the Vietnam War, Watergate and stagflation. They're at a low point now, after years in which experts seemed to fail in Iraq and at home.
Consider Iraq. The generals George W. Bush put in charge seemed superbly fitted for the job. John Abizaid had plentiful experience in the Middle East and was fluent in Arabic. George Casey had extensive experience and great talents.
But they failed to produce a winning strategy. And by the time David Petraeus, an expert on counterinsurgency, did, the media and the public weren't much interested in Iraq anymore.
Or consider financial regulation. Bush appointed and Barack Obama retained Ben Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve. It is generally agreed that Bernanke knows more about the depression of the 1930s than anyone else on earth.
At Treasury, Bush and Obama also installed experts. Henry Paulson had been CEO of Goldman Sachs, the most successful investment bank. Timothy Geithner had headed the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It's hard to conceive of any other two other individuals who knew more about finance and Wall Street.
Yet it's plain in retrospect that they made serious mistakes. They erred either in bailing out Bear Stearns in March 2008 (my view) or in declining to bail out Lehman Brothers in September 2008.
Amid the financial turmoil after Lehman collapsed, it was clear that even these experts didn't know what to do. They oscillated from one policy to another, making it up as they went along. Not all their decisions were wrong, but the current economic recovery is agonizingly sluggish.
You can certainly argue that Iraq and the financial crisis posed unique and unprecedented challenges. It was probably impossible to get everything right. But the fact is that people we had every reason to regard as the greatest experts failed to get anything close to optimal results.
In that context, it's easier to see why voters seem to have little respect for expertise.
In the 2008 electoral cycle, Democratic primary voters, caucus-goers and super-delegates chose a candidate with minimal experience in either foreign or domestic policy and no executive experience at all. But Barack Obama seemed to have other strengths. In the financial crisis, he was no more than a helpful bystander. But he zoomed ahead of John McCain in the polls and was elected.
Now Republicans are zooming from one low-expertise candidate to another. Bachmann has never run anything but a small business. Cain ran a pizza company and lost an election for senator. Perry showed little interest in national issues in his first 10 years as governor of Texas.
Romney's years in private equity and one term as governor of Massachusetts give him an edge in expertise over the present field. But his experience is thin next to contenders in the past.
It's off-putting to watch what a low value voters put on expertise. But that's what happens when experts blow it one time after another.
And the concept of “experts” is just a euphemism for the elitist mindset.
I think that’s right.
“Experts” increasingly represent not expertise, but liberalism.
Global warming. Professors. Teachers. Journalists. Bureaucrats.
All of them, now are just tools.
Barone’s theory is right but his examples are stupifying. How about the litany of Ivy League elitists who destroyed our economy: Franklin Raines, Jamie Gorelick, Barack Obama, Larry Summers, Christine Roemer, Tim Geithner, etc etc etc?
Because rocket scientists are not experts?
Cain is still an expert, just not a lawyer or career politician.
“thin expertise”
Barone makes a dumb argument.
GW Bush managed a baseball franchise.
Bill Clinton had a congressional term and a governorship of a small state under his belt.
GHW Bush had been a CIA chief.
Reagan had been an actor.
If Barone is thinking that CEO of a national business, 3 term governor of a state, or even CEO of a financial company is not comparable to the above, then Barone is simply ignoring obvious comparables to make his case.
See my home page......”experts aren’t “
The pundits are desperately trying to destroy him because all their little focus groups are proving to be wrong.
I agree, and wish Barone had used the phrase “so called experts” - instead of experts.
Our problem is not true expertise. Our problem is thinking an attorney who becomes a full time politician is an expert on anything. Our problem is thinking an academic can possibly be an expert on the real world.
A true expert, for instance, might be Cain himself on business. Or maybe not, but certainly he is closer than any full time academic or attorney.
The problem with leftist “experts”, ie, elitists, is that they think because they know a lot about one particular field of knowledge, that they can make all decisions for everyone else,
and desire the power to do so.
And just who are the experts? Michael Barone, Brit Hume and Karl Rove? LOL.
There is no revolt. The voters just concluded that the “experts” are morons and decided to ignore them.
Barone can’t even get his facts right. Bachmann was never the flavor of the month and Perry was flavor of the week at best. And yet, the “experts” predict that Cain will fall simply because the others did. Any random moron sitting on a bus can do a better political analysis than this.
> has shown prodigious ignorance on some important foreign
> policy and domestic issues.
Unlike the genius Barrack Hussein 0bama, who has repeated Jimmy Carter’s Iranian Error throughout the Middle East and North Africa, turning the entire region into a vast Islamic Concentration Camp.
Unlike the genius Barrack Hussein 0bama, who has never worked a regular job and was pampered by communist mentors all his life.
I am SICK AND TIRED of policy wonks and career politicians.
When I learned of Herman Cain, his life and his agenda last April, I was committed to vote for him.
I still am.
If that makes me a simpleton, so be it.
Thomas Reid: "If there are certain principles, as I think there are, which the constitution of our nature leads us to believe, and which we are under a necessity to take for granted in the common concerns of life, without being able to give a reason for them--these are what we call the principles of common sense; and what is manifestly contrary to them, is what we call absurd"
We should listen to Barone — After all he an ‘EXPERT’ ;-)
Every time I hear or see the word ‘Expert’ I have to *rme* (roll my eyes)
WRONG.
1. Money. Cain is the only one smart enough to run fund solicitation ads on talk radio, as he began doing on Rush on Tuesday. He can raise money, his inflow is exploding, but he doesn't need nearly as much money. He knows how to do serious "guerilla marketing." In all of his business experience he was in industries that were cash poor, the man knows how to stretch a buck to its snapping point.
2. Organization. He's a lot more organized than people think. There is the organization. And then there is the other organization, which you will see emerging into daylight very soon. An Army is being amassed, from the ground up, by others. Keep your eyes open, join ranks.
You can always hire experts. And fire them, unless they’ve been elected to office.
Cain ran a pizza company and lost an election for senator.
Cain ran a pizza company and lost an election for senator.
By the same token: "Lincoln was a railroad lawyer and lost an election for senator."
Worse:
Lincoln was a trial lawyer. :)
(well ok, the term means something different now...)
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