Choosing A Candidate -- The Fundamentals

At a Christmas party the other day, the conversation turned to politics, as so often happens these days. No one there supported Obama, or any other Democrat, although several were convinced that Hillary would challenge him. More interestingly, there was a distinct concern about the lack of quality Republican candidates to challenge Obama. And this brought up the question of what should one look for in a political candidate?

As a conservative, I certainly want my candidate to be a conservative. But that’s just part of the equation. In a general sense, there are four qualities I want to see in my political candidates even before I examine their conservative beliefs.

The first quality I want to see is that the candidate is well informed. Without a basic knowledge of facts, e.g. people, places, conflicts, and issues, I find it very difficult to support anyone for political office. I’m not saying that you need to know the current president of Kerpsplatistan off the top of your head, but any candidate who doesn’t have a passing familiarity with current events, budgeting, our history and form of government, and who our friends are in the world and what our interests are, just isn’t someone we should be electing. Not only is the learning curve too steep to pick up this kind of knowledge in office, but anyone who has made it to adulthood without this knowledge lacks the intellectual curiosity to make an effective political leader -- it’s like choosing a doctor who never cared about anatomy and thinks they can look it up as needed. That’s not someone we can trust to make good decisions. Indeed, that's the kind of person who either plans to fake their way through the job or will quickly become a puppet of their advisors/donors.

And even worse, anyone who would try to become a political leader despite this lack of knowledge either doesn’t grasp how ill-equipped they are, and s thus a fool, or doesn’t care, and is thus an opportunist. Indeed, such people represent the “something for nothing” or “reward without work” school of “thought,’ which is anathema to conservative thinking. So why would we accept them as a candidate?

The second quality I want to see in a candidate is that they have the ability to use logic and reasoning. One of the problems I have with most Democrats (and many Republicans) is that they lack the ability to reason. These people are incapable of grasping concepts like cause and effect and they are constantly proposing “solutions” to problems that cannot possibly solve the problem. A classic example of such a failure is John McCain. During the last Presidential campaign, McCain was asked what he would do about the $400 billion deficit. His response was that he would end the $40 billion practice of earmarking, and it was clear that he simply did not grasp that $40 billion in cuts would not solve a $400 billion problem. This lack of ability to use even simple logic is sadly all-too-common in our political class.

The third quality I want to see in a candidate is someone who has principles, but also is willing to change their minds when they are proven wrong. Too many politicians (people in general, actually) can never admit that they are wrong. This is a bad sign. All the greats in history, all the best CEOs, all the smartest scientists, and so on, have had the ability to evaluate the results of their actions, to see when they are mistaken, and to change course accordingly. To stick with a bad answer merely because you are unwilling to admit a mistake is a much greater failure than being wrong in the first place and is not something we should tolerate in our candidates.

But it is equally wrong to flip or flop merely because you run into opposition. It is a candidate’s principles that make us decide whether or not they are worthy of occupying an office. If they have no true principles, then we should not support them as we have no idea what they stand for or will do.

Finally, the fourth quality I’d like to see is a track record of conservative achievement, i.e. actual experience in putting conservative ideas into practice. It drives me crazy when a politician gives one good speech and suddenly everyone wants to see them in the White House. Never forget that speeches are meaningless because they don’t require politicians to commit, and almost all speeches are written for our trained-monkey politicians by their handlers. When candidate Obama read those supposedly pretty speeches, you didn’t learn anything about him except that he was a competent reader. All you really knew was what his speechwriters thought you wanted to hear. That’s why political records are so vital. Political records not only tell us how a particular politician has made up their mind in the past, which gives us insight into how they will act in the future, but they show how successful the candidate has been at implementing conservative ideas. A candidate can say all the right things, but if their history is one without achieving a single goal, then what are the odds they will suddenly become successful if we promote them? Would you promote a failed fry cook to CEO just because he uses the right buzzwords?

At the same time, we should be leery of candidates who demonstrate behaviors that are inconsistent with what they are saying. Candidates who talk about budget cuts, but spend like drunken Congressmen; candidates who speak of traditional values but then live like libertines; candidates who promise to end corruption and corporate influence, but then rely on corporate influence. . . hypocrisy is a huge warning sign of someone who is not what they claim to be, and who will abandon their promises once they no longer need you to get what they want.

To me, these are the fundamental requirements for any candidate before we even look at what kind of conservative they are. These are like minimum requirements. Fail these and I’m not interested.

Thoughts?