Ross Douthat really nails it. Many of our governing elites (personified by Jon Corzine) are, for all of their alleged intelligence and sophistication, engines of destruction. They don’t know what they can’t control and end up producing chaos. The problem is that the discrediting of an arrogant elite is summoning up an anti-expertise right-of-center politics that is likely to be just as disastrous if it comes to power (though it probably won’t.) It doesn’t matter how gruesome Cain’s displays of ignorance are. There will still be people who rightly remember that Cain saved a pizza chain where Corzine sunk a financial services company.
Here’s the thing. The conservative President who manages to reform entitlements and health care policy and bring our deficits down to a sustainable level is going to have to know their stuff. And I don’t mean reading a couple of memos the night before a debate-type “knowing their stuff.” People aren’t going to trust their retirements and health care security to a politician too lazy and vain to figure out the policies he thinks he supports. Nor should they.
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