Still Wanted: Better Politicians

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/02/still-wanted-better-politicians/384720/

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Judged by the standards of baseball, how many politicians have we in the country who could play left field for the Giants? How many have we who could even get into single-A? I think we have too much mediocrity in the business of running the government of the country, and it troubles me that this should be so at a time of such complexity and crisis.

Why should this be so in politics when it is not so in business and other professions? Why are there 2.4 qualified candidates for medical school for every one accepted, when thousands of elective public offices and party posts go by default to mediocre contestants? Why are there 10 candidates for admission to Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration for every vacancy? Why do so many students who major in government gravitate to teaching and to the civil service instead of politics? It is because the qualifications for entry into politics are neither many nor exacting, and there is no need to pass an examination to prove one's competence?

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Sounds about right, correct? But I didn't write those words today, in 2015. They were written Joseph S. Clark Jr., and they were published in The Atlantic in August 1955, under the headline, "Wanted: Better Politicians." (I've changed just three things above, all italicized: I excised the now defunct 3-I League and adjusted the admission rates for medical school and Harvard Business School— up and down, respectively. San Francisco's recent baseball prowess saved me the trouble of changing the first sentence.) Yet they remain timely 60 years later.

I'm fond of this article because it helps me keep things in perspective. It's very easy to get jaded about politics today. Maybe that's especially acute for a political journalist living in Washington, but poll after poll shows a dyspeptic public that hates Congress, disdains politics, and has little faith in government to fix anything. Even the most sober analysts assure us that it's even worse than it looks