Wrong.
Our Founding Fathers weren’t politicians or career bureaucrats. They were “normal” people who set up a government in which it was envisioned that “normal” people would leave their homes for a time to serve.
We’ve ended up with a permanent political class and bloated bureaucracy that has spent us into crushing debt and has regulated and legislated us into oblivion.
Politics should not be a career. Politicians have gotten us into this mess; I trust a businessman like Herman Cain to get us out. He lives in the “real world” not “inside the beltway”. We need to clean that nest of corruptocrats out.
GatorGirl,
Yes, normal people would go to serve, and if you bother to follow up on that claim you’d find that the “normal” people you refer to were where the House of Representatives was formed for, not the Senate or the Executive or Supreme Court.
The presidency and the senate were never intended for “average joe” to just show up and sit. Don’t believe me? Go actually read the constitution, go read the writings of Jefferson, Jay, Hamilton, etc. Senators weren’t popularly elected until the 1900s, they were sent by their state legislatures.
You are making an argument based on non factual information
If Herman Cain were running for Congressman, so be it, but he’s not, he’s running for President and his inexperience in government is not an asset in the least.
Here’s a little history lesson for you:
A key goal of the framers was to create a Senate differently constituted from the House so it would be less subject to popular passions and impulses. “The use of the Senate,” wrote James Madison in Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787, “is to consist in its proceedings with more coolness, with more system and with more wisdom, than the popular branch.” An oft-quoted story about the “coolness” of the Senate involves George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who was in France during the Constitutional Convention. Upon his return, Jefferson visited Washington and asked why the Convention delegates had created a Senate. “Why did you pour that coffee into your saucer?” asked Washington. “To cool it,” said Jefferson. “Even so,” responded Washington, “we pour legislation into the senatorial saucer to cool it.”
The House of Representatives is the popular branch, the common folk if you will, the citizen farmer who comes to government serves and goes home.. The Senate and Executive were NEVER intended as such, and to propose they were shows absolute ignorance of ones own governmental and national history.
And one more thing, from a practical historical perspective, there had not been one President ever elected that did not have either governmental or executive level military experience in the history of the United States.
The least experienced is the Bozo in the white house now, and while his experience was only a 1/2 term in the Senate, and some time in his state legislature, it is still far more than Cain has... And that’s unacceptable. We cannot follow up a neophite with an even bigger neophite, regardless of the letter beside his name on the ballot.
While it is true from a legal requirements level anyone could become President, the practical structural system of our government is intended to prevent such things. Though that structure has been perverted by its original design by a various ammendments since inception, the original intent is quite clear.
Not to mention the practical realities.