“His Highness David Brooks slams Herman Cain: “Running for office is a job for professionals.””
I disagree - we’ve had quite enough of them.
Cain is, however, a fellow with more professional executive chops than anyone in the front line of that paean to amateur incompetence that is the current administration. If governing is for professionals then most of that gaggle of self-regarding fools ought to find a pink slip on their desks come Monday morning, and the country would be vastly better off for it.
But Brooks has touched, albeit unknowingly, on the real problem with American politics at the moment - our government is composed not of professionals at executive administration, but professionals at campaigning, and what Brooks is finding inadequate about Cain is that he is not a professional at running for office. Shall we describe that sort of professional? He or she is an expert at the rousing speech full of vague generalities, at the perpetration of illusion, at manipulation of public image through the media, at accusation, ridicule and lies, at striking a heroic pose with the substance of a coward, at convincing the gullible that failed promises are only another election away from fulfillment, at cunning slander, duplicity, mendacity, and shameless exploitation of office and public funds for no better purpose than self-aggrandizement and its perpetuation. That is the sort of "professionalism" Brooks so admires in 0bama and in the Clintons before him. Public office is for that sort of blot on human dignity? Yes, actually, it is, and that's what has become wrong with public office.
What's wrong with Brooks is that he feels that the same circumstances apply to political commentary, or more precisely, political commentators, as well. That is why Rush Limbaugh so infuriates the suits in front of the camera, and why contributors to Free Republic meet a wall of horrified disdain when they manage to force into the public eye a matter the professional commentariat have declined to address. To Brooks the American public is a flock of sheep in search of a professional shepherd, and although we do act like that with distressing frequency it's a very dangerous metaphor, because we're not when it comes down to it. And it has.