I've been mulling over for a while now the analysis by John Rogers over at Kung Fu Monkey of what Republicans have been doing right and what Democrats have been doing wrong in politics. There are thousands of these, of course, but I think this one is one of the best, because it's not coming from the perspective of a political analyst, but a stand-up comic.

As one might expect a stand-up comic to say, the problems basically resolve down to Democratic candidates not being enough like stand-up comics. He goes into great detail, however, and whether or not you agree with the conclusions, they provide a fascinating starting point for thinking about how people react to politicians, and how thinkers tend to react to those people. He also followed up on some of the more common responses to his essay.

I think he's fundamentally right about how people react. It's a very hard perspective to deal with, however, because to work with it you have to simultaneously accept that the general public will cheerfully accept the worst ideas for solving a problem, angrily dismiss the best, and that they should not be considered stupid for doing so. That last part is important, because if you can't get past that, you can't convince them, or as John Rogers puts it:

Looking at what people consider the word "smart" to mean and when different groups become either condescending or hostile to each other because of the differences in definition is a really interesting starting point. The hacker and academic communities that I associate with tend to have the same viewpoint and blind spots as skilled policy analysts: "smart" measures abilities in problem-analysis, creating a logical chain to a solution, critical thinking, fact-checking, and learning. The base skills that you have to pick up and polish to do basic work at all aren't thought of much, as long as they're not so abysmally bad as to make you look continually incompetent. Tradeskill/business communities, which comprise the bulk of the population, tend towards the reverse, finding great importance in the ability to diagnose an ailing automobile, remember tax law, file paperwork in an orderly fashion, or follow directions. If you rub their faces in the fact that they never learned critical thinking abilities or research habits (which can actually be a hindrance in some situations), and fail to honor them for the skills they've obtained that you haven't, they'll hate you for it. If they sniff out that you think that that their skills are less important than yours (and unless you're an excellent actor with a fine attention to detail, it will leak), same thing. As John Rogers writes in his followup:

He then goes on to point out the amazing skills that his audience members have that he doesn't. The problem is that the problem analysis/critical thinking skills really are more important in creating functioning public policies than technical abilities — even if the latter are very refined. They're more important in any situation where you have to work your way to the most reasonable answer in a new situation where you can't apply familiar procedures in familiar ways. If you're going to have someone making state policy, you want the one who's a better thinker, not a better legal or economic technician. That means that the best people for that position are the ones who believe that the problem analysis/critical thinking skills are more important, and thus has worked to polish them more finely. That means that they're not going to do well talking to swing states, because it makes them lousy stand-up comics.

It's an interesting conundrum, made more intense by the simple tactical note that it doesn't matter how good a policy maker you are if you don't get elected. The best campaign strategy from this perspective then seems to be to give up on integrity or quality of decisions of a candidate, as long as you can field someone in the "us" camp who's at least somewhat better than the guy from the other side who is likely to be actually downright harmful. For people that believe in meritocracies, that really, really sticks in the craw.

It's only important as long as the votes are honest, and the doubt of that I have touched upon before. John Rogers notes:

I'm not convinced that this actually happened, but the point remains that it would have been much more difficult to get away with vote fraud if Kerry had been sufficiently convincing to give him enough margin of victory that a few percentage points of vote tweaking could not reverse.

It's very hard fighting my own bias on this. I want to vote for someone who I think is going to do a really good job of solving the country's problems, and who at least isn't as badly on the take as most. The ideologies on the far right have become so insane, however, that I'm willing to sacrifice quite a bit just to be able to block them.

... just for the short term, however. For the long term, I want a country that is willing to carefully consider the issues, not the emotions, fact-check, and think critically.