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Being an elected politician has everything to do with the people the politician knows, their personal network. Congress is the pinnacle of that in the U.S. The Presidency is different; they are swept into office through the efforts of others, they don’t get there purely through their own clawing. A President has supports and factions within their party that get their campaign started and see their election through.

Politicians may start with delusions that they themselves have a good handle on how to get anything done, for example, to “fix the economy”. It does not take long for them to figure out that all politicians can do is be part of a consensus in the legislative body of which they are a member. If I’m elected to town council or Congress, all I can do is sponsor legislation and vote on legislation. Surprise, surprise, one quickly gets the idea from other members - if you ever want to see your own name on ANY piece of legislation, i.e., sponsor or co-sponsor a bill that has a chance of coming up on the floor - you’d better start being part of the negotiations that go on. Otherwise, you’ll lose your next election and be gone because your opponent will be able to accuse you of doing “nothing” and you won’t have even one special interest group in your State that will help you get re-elected - they will all be helping your opponent.

So if I have “knowledge” it amounts to nothing. If I want jobs in my State, I need to talk to movers and shakers in the private sector to get them to create jobs in my State. There is a wide array of movers and shakers, and politics is basically divided into two teams but the m & s would rather hedge their bets on that, they shift from one to the other. The movers and shakers, of course, are trying to get what they want for themselves, they don’t give a rat’s patooty about the politician’s career other than if the politician gets done what they want done. The more the politician gets m & s support the more influence they have over other politicians, and the more capable they are to process the m & s legislation requests through to law. That’s what the politician comes to realize - their job is one of gatekeeper to the voting body, be it the town council or Congress. A m & s must go through a politician to get their legislative requests passed into law. But if a politician is not an effective law passer (able to convince other politicians to vote for their bill) then they become useless to the m & s.

There are many, many m & s (interest groups), and many have competing goals. Nowadays, many are not for-profit companies, so they can’t create jobs; those non-profits certainly have allied with the intelligentsia and the press so they create a constant headwind against a politician’s re-election. So the politician has to deal with their requests as well as those of the industry m & s.

Since there are so many interest groups and relatively few politicians, a traffic jam forms trying to talk to politicians. And thus is born the gatekeeper to the gatekeeper, the lobbyist. The lobbyist is a consultant, a service provider, something many people don’t really grasp. In order to sell a service profitably, one has to build up the service in the mind of the client to far more than the client can do on their own. The client then sees tremendous value in the service. Jack Abramoff touted that his firm had leverage with over 100 Congressional votes. If I’m an interest group, Jack’s service seems well worth the price; I wind up with a better end-product law.

Now why would a politician talk to a lobbyist ? The traffic jam. The politician as noted above absolutely needs to satisify legislation requests, but they can’t talk to 400,000 people personally. What to do ? Get organized, of course, prioritize. The biggest groups first, the most pressing issues that affect the most constituents. The one thing the politician must do in keeping the voting public happy (staying in office) is avoid publicity problems. If they avoid PR problems, all the relationships they have with people in the political and private sector arena will keep them re-elected. If other politicians in my state like me, they will publicly speak out on my behalf (do some marketing); in return I can help them out.

It all comes down to relationships; if the currently in-office politician keeps all the largest groups tied into them through relationships and no one “jumps ship” to a newcomer, the newcomer has an enormous hurdle to overcome to get elected.

When things are bad, like now, the politician is scrambling to “make the economy better”. But they know that they themselves, and their staff, will not draft legislation to get anything done or make anything positive happen in the economy. They can’t because they have not a clue where to start. If they write a law on their own to “help” a certain industry, which will then cause the industry to grow and hire people - they are 100% sure that the law will blow up in their face and not work as intended. Why would they compose this on their own and risk having problems if they can just simply ask the m & s in that industry if there are any laws they would like passed that would help them grow ? It’s the same with non-profits. The politician’s staff won’t write an environmental law - they get these from the environmental interests so they don’t go out on their own and create an environmental law that the environmentalists hate. Etc.

And how does the politician know who to contact for any given interest group, that may have thousands of organizations or companies involved ? Voila - the lobbyist sorts it all out for them. The lobbyist has a client list which reads like a who’s who of the interest group. You want to know what is needed and wanted ? Ask the lobbyist, their service to the politician is to boil down all the requests and ideas, right down all the way to finished legal text ready to sign. They patiently and efficiently work with the politician’s staff. With perhaps talking to only several lobbyists, the politician’s staff winds up with a bill that can be voted on which is based on all the work done in the lobbyist’s client’s offices; number crunching, theorizing, analyzing, etc. And it’s a professionally-prepared thing that will find support amongst the m & a of the given industry that it affects, so other politician’s staffs can usually come up recommending a Yes vote after they talk with their lobbyists.

The body of knowledge that the elected politician possesses, therefore, is that of their personal relationships; their address book. They pick which “team” Dem or Repub, they want to play on, then they set about horse trading; they get their bills to pass and vote for other politician’s bills, with the legislative staffs managing all the legwork. As part of a team, they’ve selected the basis of their publicity brand, and over time, if they’re smart, they build their own personal brand and keep strengthing that brand in the minds of voters by making the most show of the votes they make, all while they keep the backroom deals flowing productively for interests groups (which support both teams).

As far as being President goes, the personal relationships and “address book” grow from whatever they were beforehand to being at the top of every m & s address book in the world the moment they are declared winner of the Presidential election. The President simply has to be a person comfortable with making big decisions or he will crumble under their weight. The President offers Congress someone else for the public to blame so the voting public doesn’t really catch on to the fact that it’s their own Congressman - their own “favorite” guy - who actually is the source of growth of the goverment beast. If anything would convince that some mythical “background knowledge” is unnecessary, Clinton and Obama would certainly be it. The Executive Branch obviously can deal with any moron occupying it’s head; in many ways the office is not as critical as is commonly thought. The opportunity cost is great when a moron is President, certainly, because a better man could have achieved so much more, but the only parts of their resume that really provide insight into what kind of decisions they will make are not indicative of their knowledge, but of their wisdom in business, seeing an approaching slippery slope, and their character.

IMHO.