Politician Needed?

Anyone--doctors, carpenters, professional wrestlers--can enter politics.

Once they do, however, they're no longer operating as doctors, carpenters, or professional wrestlers.

They're politicians--which, as they say in football, is a skill position in itself.

Politicians are politicians

Let's face it: The people who want you to vote for them because they're not politicians are, in fact, politicians.

If you elect them, you'd better hope they're good politicians, not good carpenters, surgeons, or businessmen.

Call a surgeon if your leg needs amputating, but for political work, get a politician.

Not just any politician though.

There are discriminations to be made.

Criticize particular politicians? Good idea. They're not all competent or honest.

Is every single politician incompetent and dishonest? I doubt it, but if so, let's blast each and every one.

That's still different from lambasting politicians as a species.

If every single doctor were incompetent, we wouldn't say, "Let's do away with doctoring."

We'd say, "Let's see why doctors are no good and fix things so we have better ones."

Can we fix things so we have better politicians?

If politicians are like the weather, it's pointless to ask.

You can only grumble about nature, not change it.

If we cast off the fatalism, however, we can start to ask, for example, how campaigning has overtaken the actual work of politicians, how money has overtaken actual campaigning, how the complexity of our society has driven up the expense of gaining office, how such costs have affected what politicians do in office, how the media's growing reliance on entertainment as a central product has affected political coverage, how public tolerance of unhealthy campaign practices has exacerbated all of the above--and the list goes on.

It's all worth asking if we start with the premise that there is a job in society for which politicians are the right tool.

And if there is, then we can look for ways to improve that tool so it will do the job better.