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Guys, can we just, as a society, agree not to elect any more celebrities to public office. I just want my next president to be boring. Just some dweeby guy/gal

• em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
  I don't even think should expect a president to have a law degree. Many east asian countries and germany have engineering phd's as their leader.
• bluthru 9y ago
  >The American political system for all its faults, is pretty good It's actually fucking atrocious: 2 parties, and you depend on the money of the elite to become elected. If our system was decent, people wouldn't have looked towards Trump to reject it. We voted for Democrats in 2008 to fix healthcare, and the public option was denied by Lieberman and Ben Nelson (former insurance executive).
• tomlock 9y ago
  Since Ronald Reagan there's been a precedent set that it isn't a bad thing for conservatives to have previously been in showbiz. Same is definitely true on the "other" side. I honestly would prefer to see some salt-of-the-earth person not involved in politics elected to office ala Ricky Muir in Australia (where I'm from). I don't necessarily think lack of political experience is a bad thing for a politician to have. Many of the positions which hold the requisite political knowledge and support elected officials are hired, not elected.
  • sjg007 9y ago
    It helps to be charismatic, which celebrities have in spades. And you have to be attractive. I’d rather there be intelligent debate rather than overgeneralized tweets. Twitter is toxic. Even here on hacker news we can’t have lively debate. Critical thinking is going extinct. And nobody cares.
    • tomlock 9y ago
      I don't think its as bad as all that! I think people do care that reasoned argument seems to be drowned out by toxic soundbites, but there's just currently no good way to interact with the world without using toxic channels. I'm optimistic about someone finding a solution. I also definitely think people care. I think its just that those that don't care are currently amplified.
    • BatFastard 9y ago
      The internet is toxic! It's not even anonymity, since on places like Facebook people know who you are. It's more the one (or more) steps removed from personal consequences. Hacker news is one of the few places I find intelligent thoughtful discussion. Occasionally people are jerks, but compared to the internet in general, this place is a calm like on a mountain top.
  • dragonwriter 9y ago
    > Since Ronald Reagan there's been a precedent set that it isn't a bad thing for conservatives to have previously been in showbiz. Being previously in showbiz isn't the issue; having no government experience when running for President is. Reagan was two-term governor of California before running for President. > Same is definitely true on the "other" side. Er...what? The Democrats haven't nominated a Presidential candidate with a Reagan-like showbiz background. > I honestly would prefer to see some salt-of-the-earth person not involved in politics elected to office ala Ricky Muir in Australia (where I'm from). I'd prefer an inexperienced government head about as much as an inexperienced brain surgeon. > I don't necessarily think lack of political experience is a bad thing for a politician to have. A lack of government experience may be fine in someone running for city council, or the lower house of their state legislature. President of the United States isn't really an entry level job, though. > Many of the positions which hold the requisite political knowledge and support elected officials are hired, not elected. Sure, there's several rings out from the President, both in and through the cabinet and in the executive office of the president, that also aren't ideal entry-level jobs. But your not going to be able to evaluate what you get from those people effectively without substantial grounding in government as President.
• pnathan 9y ago
  Extremely strong concur. I want someone competent, qualified, and trying to be basically decent to Americans and non-Americans. There are many elected officials in high office in both parties who would roughly fulfill that description. BoringPol 2020 :)
• losvedir 9y ago
  > got a law degree, and served for a few years in a relevant public office, like governor or senator. You know like a normal politician. I hate the preponderance of lawyers in the U.S. political system. I would much prefer engineers, who have experience building large systems, and executives who have experience managing large organizations. But I agree with the desire for boring, "dweeby", competent people.
  • idrios 9y ago
    As an engineer, I still want someone with a law degree to be president. As much as I want to see some large, overhauling change for the public good like Interstate Highways under Eisenhower, I also concede that US law is extremely nuanced and I think someone who studied law (and maybe history or political science) will best be able to think about how decisions will affect everyone.
    • cmurf 9y ago
      Congress writes laws so it makes sense many politicians in that body are lawyers for the reasons you state. The court is made up not merely of lawyers but judges, their skill set is interpreting law, and dealing with their inevitable conflicts including legal hierarchies. I don't agree the president needs to be a lawyer. That person can surround themselves with many good lawyers. The office of the president has the White House counsel, to deal with executive branch legal issues. The attorney general is completely separate, who is the head law enforcement official representing the entire government. Ostensibly any issue arriving in front of the president is something important and difficult to decide on or someone else would have already done that. Good presidents have such decision making ability without getting stuck in minutia and petty arguments that serve no purpose, rather than acting like it's a TV show. They should have a firm grasp of ethics because often they're going to have to choose one among many good choices, or one among many bad choices. They should have a very good executive reasoning skill, cause and effect, consequences for their actions a decade or more down the road, rather than merely the next election, or the next Tweet. A good president needs to be a decent orator because they get their political capital from the people, and there will need to be many inspiring speeches, and condolence speeches. In this I'd include when to speak, and when not to speak. Blah - there's more to it than that. But the point is, the president does not need to be a lawyer.
• sumedh 9y ago
  > You know like a normal politician. Or what used to be one. Oh you mean the guy or gal who ships your jobs overseas with a smile?
• kiliantics 9y ago
  This is a website for tech and for startup culture, hosted by an incubator. A lot of startup culture is about "disrupting" industries, reshaping society, and streamlining the inefficiencies in the ways things are currently done. But politically, I find the discourse here pretty uncritical of the status quo, aside from a bit of libertarian contrarianness, which doesn't have any ideas that fall that far away from business as usual. > The American political system for all its faults, is pretty good and maybe we should like try and do something normal What do you consider normal in American politics? Here's what I think has been pretty normal historically: - wealth inequality - war - corruption - union busting - labour exploitation of poor people and immigrants - racism - in recent decades: the decline of government spending on public services and investment in infrastructure and other projects that benefit the average citizen (rather than just subsidies to the already wealthy) - interference in international politics, often for the worse (installing military dictatorships, sometimes only to go back to war with the same regimes, fighting expensive pointless wars against an ideology across the globe, offering unreasonable foreign aid to poor nations which cripple their economies, pressuring privatisation via IMF and other international bodies which cripples economies) - as with the last point, I would have put this higher on the list but I figured it would make this comment even more unpopular than it already will probably be: genocide I think many of these normalities of US politics in recent times have sort of inevitably led to the state it is currently in. So the election of celebrities at this point is something which, to me, seems to be more or less a continuation of US politics as normal. The absurdity of it all has just been allowed to go this far. Saying that you want things to go back to "normal" really says something about how you have been affected by all the above points. It seems, for much of middle class America, that the detrimental consequences of past policy have only just now started to encroach on the parts of society that were previously protected from it. So now that we are finally upset in this space of tech startups that has so much power and a desire to make radical change in the world, why ask for "normal" again? Why not ask for a radical change to a new kind of politics? Why can't we be critical and wonder whether the current system really is all that good as we're told, or whether the faults in the system are actually much worse than we previously thought? I don't want another celebrity present. I also don't want anyone like the corrupt warmongers of the past either. I don't see why we'd want a president at all really.
  • 9y ago
• geowwy 9y ago
  ⎡I just want my next president to be boring. Just some dweeby guy/gal in a suit who isn’t part of some political dynasty, that went to school, studied hard and got a law degree, and served for a few years in a relevant public office, like governor or senator. You know like a normal politician. Or what used to be one.⎦ If something happens to Trump you might get your wish in Mike Pence.
• maxxxxx 9y ago
  I hope we will at some point get some diversity in the background of politicians. Seems there are way too many lawyers.
• scrollaway 9y ago
  I agree with your post, but: > The American political system for all its faults, is pretty good It just isn't. The American political system is one of the core reasons why the country is so divided. Why Trump got elected at all, despite being supported by the minority. Why people are now talking about Oprah running. The American political system was broken before Trump. The current president is one of the gross symptoms of a much more insidious disease; one of the roots of that disease is in fact, that political system. Of course, it's not some tv star that'll fix it when it benefits them. In fact, statistically it's unlikely you'll find a president (who got elected, ergo benefited from the system) who will change that.
  • refurb 9y ago
    I would argue the country would be divide regardless of the political system. And having lived outside the US, other countries are easily as polarized although maybe in a less adversarial way.
    • amazingman 9y ago
      If we had a remotely reasonable voting system—i.e. if we got rid of first last the post—the divide wouldn’t be as dramatic and we wouldn’t have everyone’s crazy racist uncle as president.
• LearnerHerzog 9y ago
  I think it sort of depends on the person but I mostly agree. There is massive power in someone who truly believes "anything is possible" and takes massive action on extremely high goals they set for themselves and achieve. The Napoleon-Hill-Approved humans who let nothing get in the way of their self-designed "definite life purpose". Better examples of celebs-turned-political are Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who put the effort into learning the material and acknowledging the crowd. Although Trump and Oprah are undoubtedly the kinds of action-takers who make their extremely high goals a reality, in my opinion they both lack one or two other vital presidential qualities that come with their personality types. Trump lacks the humility to admit what he doesn't know and learn it— instead he lashes out on Twitter, taking every unimportant comment personally; he is always thinking about competition and personal problems rather than considering all-inclusive encouragement. Oprah has the opposite problem; I can't judge her until she's given a chance, but I imagine her relying too much on people-pleasing, and would perhaps struggle to deal with constant decisions millions of people will dislike her for no matter what she chooses (unless she can afford a few hundred million "free cars" to give away to her new audience).