MAY 10, 2023 – When you attend a major league baseball game, you expect to see accomplished baseball players pitching, hitting, running and fielding. You’d howl if the players missed every other catch and throw; or if a football team took to the field, played football and called it baseball. Likewise, you wouldn’t want your dentist to install a new fancy, cedar fence around your back yard, and you wouldn’t let the fence installers anywhere close to your teeth. In reality, such mismatches don’t occur. Despite society’s many foibles and failures, heart surgeons operate on hearts, not car engines, and commercial airliners are flown by trained pilots, not short-order cooks.
Never in my daily life are my expectations incompatible with context. When we needed to replace our hot water heater, I narrowed my search to plumbers. I didn’t google, “heart surgeons” (. . . until we received a couple of quotes from plumbers). When we needed to replace our driveway, I didn’t look up “tax accountants” but lined up someone expert at installing concrete driveways. And so on. This doesn’t mean that the expert we retain for one task or another won’t disappoint, but the shortfall in performance won’t be because we’d hired a plumber, for example, to do our taxes.
When I heard that George Santos has been charged with multiple crimes, my initial reaction was, “The dirty, rotten . . .” But then I caught myself. Why was I upset? What occurred to me was that my displeasure with this “rotten apple” had less to do with George Santos himself and far more to do with my . . . unrealistic expectations.
Sure, we can say it’s reasonable to expect that candidates for elective office are ethical, informed, so on, but apart from filing truthful campaign financial information and attending the crash course at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a week of orientation in Washington ahead of the opening session, there’s no special school, training or certification required to stand for high political office. The only standards for House, Senate and White House, set forth in the Constitution, are bare minimums: age, citizenship (birth in the U.S. for the president) and residency.
In the absence of any other pre-conditions, our expectations need to be adjusted accordingly—downward. This isn’t cynicism. It’s pure reality. If anyone over 25 who’s been a citizen for at least seven years and is a resident of the state in which the candidate “is chosen” (district residency isn’t even a requirement) wants to run for Congress, there’s nothing stopping a George Santos (or certain other choice members) from standing for election. Since voting eligibility is correspondingly low, when a certain “low life” runs for office, there’s nothing stopping people from pulling the lever in the low life’s favor.
Yet, if it’s reasonable to impose licensure requirements (in conjunction with extensive education, training and proficiency testing) on airline pilots, heart surgeons, dentists, plumbers, teachers et alia ad nauseam, certification for political candidates would be a non-starter. Ideally, their eligibility—and ours as voters—would hinge on proficiency in reading, writing, speaking, civics, history, geography, economics, and dare I say, math and science. The very concept of proficiency requirements, however, would be fraught (politically!) and in the final analysis, the whole scheme would be antithetical to our notions of democratic government.
The only alternative, then, is lower expectations. Lower expectations guarantee lower disappointment when clowns appear front and center in the circus that unrealistically, we too often expect to be a higher form of enterprise than a traveling association of lion tamers, trinket hawkers, cotton candy peddlers, trapeze artists and . . . clowns on unicycles. And when exceptionally qualified people do run for office and are elected—as many are—we should celebrate their Olympic performances in the circus tent of low expectations.
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
