You probably wouldn’t hire a gardener to fix your car, or have the garbage man cut your hair. But you’d give one of the hardest jobs in the world to someone with zero experience.
I don’t see this as an “apples-to-oranges” comparison. Lots of jobs are screwed up by professionals, but we don’t conclude that we need amateurs.
A baseball team with a losing record might well fire some of their pitching staff — professionals, especienced, career pitchers. But they won’t replace them with a half-dozen guys off the street, or even a half-dozen good pitchers coming out of high school teams. You might pick one rookie, but you usually put them in the minors first for experience.
The concept of experience being a bad thing is ludicrous. That’s why the term “career politician” is used instead, because it “sounds bad”.
Sarah Palin had been in politics 19 years — it was her career. She was a career politician, but nobody calls her a “career politician”. She simply was in politics as a career. She was a “good” experienced politician. We praised her for her experience, her savvy, her ability to get things done, for her many accomplishments starting out as a Wasilla councilperson in 1992.
What I think we really want is an outsider — someone who isn’t so wrapped up in Washington. But almost all our candidates meet that criteria. Bachmann is the most “Washington” of our candidates, but nobody would reject her as being a “Washington Insider” (I think Newt is most open to that criticism).
Saying Cain has zero experience is, frankly, insulting. His experience is in the real world, the world of business where you actually have to produce results or you’re finished. This contrasts drastically with others who spend years in office presiding over deterioration without being held to account (for whatever reason). Again, what we’ve seen from these so-called experts has been an unheralded disaster. The Founding Fathers would’ve preferred those “amateurs” with little experience to the permanent political class we’ve had now for far too long. We’d all be better off.