Dumbing democracy down: Leadership is not a drinking game

A drinking buddy? (Wikimedia Commons) I don't know about the rest of you, but when I'm looking for a new doctor the first thing I consider about the candidates is whether or not I'd like to have a beer with them. When I was diagnosed with cancer, I immediately headed out to a bar to find an oncologist. I use the same criterion when searching for lawyers and accountants, and you can be sure that I would never hire anyone who prefers wine or tea or orange juice. I'm also certain that school administrators use the beer standard when interviewing applicants for teaching positions, and it goes without saying that nothing could be more important when evaluating police officers and firefighters and operators of heavy machinery. Education, skill, intelligence, experience, courage and integrity are nothing compared to the consummate definition of competence, talent and wisdom that is being able to shoot the shit over a beer.

Of course, no one would take that first paragraph seriously. No one who is a serious person, anyway. It's absurd at face value. And yet a recurring theme that pretty well defines the degradation and insipidity of our national political theater is the idea that we should seek political candidates with whom we'd like to have a beer. It's supposed to be some sort of test of character, but it's actually a testament to the level of idiocy with which some regard the very concept of governance. It was one of the means by which the traditional media manipulated the 2000 presidential election. Al Gore was so clearly much more qualified and prepared to be president that some other standard had to be established to create at least some semblance of a rationale for the very candidacy of the Lesser Bush. So it was the beer standard.

The idea behind the beer standard is that it makes someone a regular guy, which was particularly absurd as applied to Bush, because the son of a president, the grandson of a senator, and the snotty child of privilege and aristocracy whose young adulthood was most notable for the number of times he got arrested for being a reckless boorish asshole will ever be a regular guy. But the standard was even more absurd by its own standard, because who would want to waste precious moments of a life with a dissolute lout who squandered endless opportunities to become something more than a dissolute lout who squanders opportunities? But then the traditional media helped cast Bush as a rancher, despite his not having any actual cattle on his ranch, and as a cowboy, despite there being no evidence that he even knew how to ride a horse. But the bigger problem with the beer standard wasn't Bush; it was the very concept that in evaluating presidential candidates, we should be looking for a regular guy, invented or otherwise.

The national press corps hated Al Gore. They sneered at him for acting like he was the smartest guy in the room, mostly because they felt diminished by the fact that he actually was. They were petty and vindictive and intimidated and insulted, and they never really bothered to notice that the smartest guy in the room had the smartest ideas about running the country. So we ended up with an administration that incompetently ignored screaming warnings about what would turn out to be the worst terrorist attack ever on American soil, an administration that incompetently allowed the perpetrator of that attack to get away, an administration that then manipulated the national trauma over that attack to launch two failed wars (one of which had nothing to do with that terrorist attack), an administration that manipulated the national trauma over that attack for the most cynical means of political gain, an administration that then ignored the screaming warnings that a great city was in imminent danger from a natural disaster that turned into an unnatural catastrophe, and an administration that crashed the economy. Al Gore ended up with a Nobel Peace Prize.

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