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That is the most un-insulting thing I’ve heard all day...I think.

If I need an experienced pipefitter, I find someone experienced at fitting pipe, that’s all I’m saying. If you want to rubbish that by labeling it “conventional wisdom,” then go ahead. That’s your right. I just don’t see how you are going to convince tens of millions of voters to hire a grocery store check-out clerk (I am not calling Herman Cain that, I am just presenting a hypothetical) for the position of pipefitter on a hotel construction site. Even if the previous pipefitter I’m replacing is the biggest screw-up this side of the Mississippi.

The rap on “conventional wisdom” is not that it’s always wrong, it’s that it’s not always (or even often) correct. If you know a person who is a congenital liar, you can’t simply disbelieve everything he says because sometimes he’ll tell you the truth just to mess you up. You have to do your own research. (And I’m NOT calling anybody here a liar. I’m just drawing another ridiculous analogy.)

My personal opinion about Herman Cain, and it’s just that, MHO (everybody has one, along with one of something else), I don’t think he can win because he’s never held a public office. Should he? Maybe, I’m open to that. But he has never been a peer of the pack of kittens he intends to herd. As a person who has worked all his life at a career, I think that’s a fatal flaw for a candidate.

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.

>>> If I need an experienced pipefitter, I find someone experienced at fitting pipe, that’s all I’m saying. If you want to rubbish that by labeling it “conventional wisdom,” then go ahead. That’s your right. >>>

Your problem also is you are asking the wrong question. We don’t need an experienced pipe fitter. We need someone to come in and ask is pipe even the right material? Are we even defining what constitutes a proper fix? Yes, we’ve had experienced pipe fitters fitting pipe - and it is screwing up the entire world. Maybe, just maybe, the whole paradigm of our pipe fitting work and what has been considered proper is all wrong.

In other words, the last thing we need is someone who is good at the status quo. And you seem to say that we need someone who is just that.