We’re not hiring a pipe fitter - the analogy would be the CEO position of the pipe fitting company. That person could well be someone who had never touched a pipe. But it would be someone who could run an organization and who understood the business climate in general and someone who understood where government screws it up.
Many great CEO’s are hired into industries they have never been involved with before and done extremely well. That’s because politics is not a specific skill like being a surgeon or fitting a pipe or throwing a football. Politics is about judgement and leadership and understanding the free markets and so on. All of that can be had outside the realm of elected office.
Now conventional wisdom is not always wrong, but it shows very little creativity to brush aside something simply based on conventional wisdom.
Perhaps what is clouding your vision is that you have, as you said, worked your entire life at a particular career. That is extremely conventional. Not bad necessarily, but extremely conventional.
All of which points to these analogies; an unknown could never unseat a sitting Governor in a Senate primary, but Rubio did. A sitting senator could never lose a senate primary, but Senator Bennett did. A sitting Democrat governor could never lose in New Jersey, but Corzine did. The Democrats will never lose the Kennedy seat, but they did. And on and on and on...
There has never been an election cycle before where someone like Cain would have any possibility. There has never been the perfect storm there is now, including the new media and how name recognition and fund raising no longer requires a lot of time and history.
The odds may still be against it, but that “Obama was inexperienced” or that “no one’s done it before” or any of that old school thinking is not relevant.
You make good points about those good CEOs. But, as a rule, hiring CEOs with no experience in the core business of the company leads to trouble in the long run. The auto companies have historically done better with CEOs who were “car guys.” But I am sure you can pull a hundred examples of good CEOs that were strangers to their company’s field. Carly Fiorina, for example.
My main point from the start is, as great a candidate as Herman Cain is, he won’t be elected because he’s never held any office, never had to campaign, nor persuade anybody to vote for him, He hasn’t demonstrated that necessary skill set. Don’t shoot the messenger.
Not a precise analogy: Rubio was hardly an "unknown." He was the Speaker of the House, IIRC. He had campaigned, got elected, persuaded other elected legislators, he demonstrated the necessary skill sets.