Two of the leading presidency candidates in the polls right now are Donald Trump and Ben Carson. Another increasingly popular candidate is Carly Fiorina. The presidency would be the first elected office for each of them.
Clearly, the public is sick of politicians, so these political outsiders have great appeal. But isn’t some experience in government helpful for someone in the top office? It is often said that we should run the government like a business. But is this really true? When people run things that aren’t businesses like a business–say, churches, colleges, non-profits–isn’t it always a disaster?
And yet I acknowledge the problem with politicians. Being able to get elected to an office is also not the same thing as governing. And someone good at the former may not be the best at the latter.
Former governors are probably the best qualified to run the federal government, since they have run governments before. Unlike people from the business world, they have had to deal with legislatures, courts, and bureaucracies. Pretending that such institutions can just be ignored by a strong leader is just unrealistic, given our constitutional system.
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