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> As a result I think we'll see detectable pressure for only risk taking narcissists to run for public office. Even beyond what is usual for politics. I love t

• roenxi 3y ago
  Well when the Democrats were in their darkest hour, democracy in the US was on the brink, Congress was on the verge of falling to raging mobs, etc, etc and they faced their greatest political bogyman in the last few decades ... they put forward Joseph Biden as their best hope of defeating Trump. With benefit of hindsight now that we have a few years of opinion polling, we might suspect that he isn't actually the best that the party could come up with, and that there are a number of much better candidates who are choosing not to run. He is wildly unpopular and would basically only beat the previous generally-unliked president Trump. I don't think that is normal. We've had 2 electoral cycles now where only unelectable candidates stood up. As recently as 2007 we had the likes of Obama, and before that Clinton (who say what you will, had approval polling that trended in the right direction) out of the Democrats. And Bush was popular until the chickens came home to roost on the horrific foreign policy blunders. So we can detect that something has gone wrong in the last few electoral cycles where either the quality of the candidates has declined or the visibility into what the government is actually doing has improved. I argue both, but today I'm focusing on the former.