JOBS.

A Moment of Clarity.

Words.

"The marvelous paradox of politics is that it is the only field in which lack of experience is considered a job qualification. Or, conversely, in which extensive experience is cited as a negative.

...the attack on the “career politician” is as misguided as it is familiar. Your career politician is my devoted public servant.

Imagine this line of argument applied to another job. “Unlike my competition, I haven’t spent my life in the oil industry,” an aspirant to the chief executive post at Exxon Mobil announces. “I’m no career retailer,” crows a would-be Wal-Mart head.

...My point isn’t that previous political experience is a necessary qualification for elective office, even high elective office. It’s not. Indeed, it’s healthy to have a mixture of experiences and backgrounds — a Congress that includes former doctors and business executives along with former state legislators and ex-governors. Politics isn’t rocket science; it doesn’t require an advanced degree or specialized expertise.
But neither is political experience irrelevant — or the negative that Romney, Palin & Co. imply.

...As James Madison wrote in Federalist 62: “A good government implies two things: first, fidelity to the object of government, which is the happiness of the people; secondly, a knowledge of the means by which that object can be best attained.”

In other words: Wanting to do the right thing doesn’t matter if you don’t know how to get it done. The political short-timer has little interest in forging relationships or building the coalitions necessary for productive compromise. The reviled “career politician” may have been around long enough to see this play before. The more complicated the issues, from health care to defense spending, the more valuable the institutional knowledge.

...Experience matters, even in politics. This is why Vice President Biden, with long-standing relationships in Congress, brings value to the Obama White House. It is why governorships have proved to be such an effective preparation for the presidency.

No “career politician” — that is, no one who’s managed to win reelection — is going to be dumb enough to run an ad promoting himself as such. Surely, Romney won’t be the last candidate to deploy the career politician epithet against a threatening opponent.

But every time this phrase is used, it’s worth wondering why the attacker professes to so disdain the very vocation he so avidly seeks."

THE WASHINGTON POST: Those career politicians