Fair enough. But by whom would you rather be taught?
From an article in Politico (my emphasis):
Until last fall, Ron Johnson was just an intensely private guy with a good business and a nice house on Lake Winnebago. He kept a stack of Wall Street Journals next to his bed, folded just right so he wouldn't forget to read columnist Dan Henninger on this or Paul Gigot on that. A trim, silver-haired businessman, he was rich but unknown, even in this, his hometown, despite big donations to Lourdes High School and his thriving plastics company here.
Running for office never crossed his mind.
Barack Obama changed all that.
A little later, it says:
...his media diet consists mainly of The Wall Street Journal and talk radio...
Red flag! What else is next to his bed, an old copy of Atlas Shrugged? Is this supposed to substitute for expertise?
The piece continues:
The story of the 2010 election — the tea party drama, the anti-Obama tension, the prominence of right-wing media figures and a wounded Democratic incumbent — all can be distilled in one state, Wisconsin, and through one candidate, Johnson.
Much like his contemporaries — Sharron Angle in Nevada or Rand Paul in Kentucky or Joe Miller in Alaska — Johnson talks the talk of the tea party and also talks of going to Washington as less a lawmaker, more a messenger. He argues with conviction that Obama represents nothing less than a threat to turn America into a "socialist, European-style" state, and audiences nod along, the judgment sounding neither rabid nor harsh — even in Wisconsin, a state that fell hard for Obama.
___
Tea party rallies started heating up, feeding off the anger about talk in Washington of government-run health care and a cap-and-trade vote in the House. Independents — the same ones who bought into Obama's original promise of change — started to turn on Democrats. Some of the independents began to flirt with the tea partiers, then as now a loose affiliation of activists with varying degrees of clout.
Johnson got sucked in by all of this. The Tea Party of Oshkosh was pulling together a rally for a fall event, featuring Joe the Plumber, the working man who emerged as a folk hero to small-government conservatives in 2008. They needed a businessman to talk about what they saw as the scary, Big Brother approach to Obamacare — and Johnson was happy to oblige. His daughter Carrie was born with a heart defect and saved by two doctors — a story anyone following this campaign has heard many times in ads and speeches ever since. So he let loose with an attack on the demonization of doctors and, more broadly, the mortal threat to American exceptionalism.
The new law “will destroy our health care system,” Johnson said in an interview. “I am totally convinced of that.”
How? Not important.
It is now clear all the talk of stimulus spending, a health care takeover and new energy taxes were to blame — coming together to form a powerful electoral force that swept candidates like Johnson, Angle and others into Senate races against once-sturdy incumbents now threatened with defeat.
In Wisconsin, the speech put Johnson on the political map — and gave him a sense that Feingold was beatable. The more Johnson talked about politics, the more he toyed with the idea of plunging in.
In the Times today, an editorial says:
When it came to the actual details of governing, Senator Russ Feingold, a Democrat of Wisconsin, trounced his Republican challenger, Ron Johnson, in a debate in Wausau, Wis., on Monday night. He knew that the new health care law will not reduce Medicare spending but will slow its staggering rate of growth. He knew that a vast majority of small businesses would not pay higher taxes if rates went up on the wealthy and that global warming isn’t caused by sunspots. He knew that without the 2009 stimulus there would be at least 1.5 million fewer people with jobs.
Mr. Johnson, on the other hand, proudly proclaimed recently that he doesn’t “think this election is about details.” That’s as good an explanation as any of why — in Wisconsin as in so many states — candidates like Mr. Johnson are ahead in the polls. Insurgent Republicans don’t need details when they can play on the furious emotions of voters who have been misled into believing that positive changes like the health care law are catastrophic failures.
I guess my point in all of this is that successful businessmen -- like the Harvard faculty -- are experts at what they do. Rather than try to master government overnight, why not stick to running their businesses and leave the complex task of governing to people who actually know what they're doing?
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