{"id":11802,"date":"2011-10-26T12:00:58","date_gmt":"2011-10-26T16:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=11802"},"modified":"2011-10-26T12:00:58","modified_gmt":"2011-10-26T16:00:58","slug":"dan-gardner-on-how-to-rate-politicians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/10\/26\/dan-gardner-on-how-to-rate-politicians\/","title":{"rendered":"Dan Gardner on how to rate politicians"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dan Gardner<\/a> provides a handy way to scale the achievements of politicians:<\/p>\n

\n

The central dilemma facing any elected politician is this: What is good is often not popular and what is popular is often not good.<\/p>\n

Most politicians want to do good. But in order to do anything, good or otherwise, they must first hold power, and the only way to do that is to promise and deliver what is popular. Thus, politicians are pulled between doing what is good and what is popular.<\/p>\n

Imagine a Venn diagram with two partially overlapping circles. One is labelled \u201cgood politics.\u201d The other \u201cgood policy.\u201d That\u2019s the whole game.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also a handy way of judging politicians.<\/p>\n

The Bad Politician is one who is only concerned with the \u201cgood politics\u201d circle. Fortunately, they are less common than cynics think. H.L. Mencken had the Bad Politician in mind when he observed that \u201cthe saddest life is that of a political aspirant under democracy. His failure is ignominious and his success is disgraceful.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Average Politician finds the area that clearly lies in both circles and stays there. He may make occasional road trips into good politics\/bad policy but he avoids good-policy\/bad politics like an alcoholic avoids dry counties. This is a crowded category.<\/p>\n

The Good Politician finds previously unidentified areas where policy and politics overlap and occasionally risks his popularity by supporting good policies that are bad politics. Every politician claims to make this grade — \u201cIt may not be popular to promise sunshine and lollipops but, by golly, it\u2019s the right thing to do!\u201d — and yet only a minority ever do.<\/p>\n

The Great Politician expands the \u201cgood politics\u201d circle so that more good policy — as he sees it — becomes good politics. In a phrase, the Great Politician leads.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

As he quite correctly points out, our current prime minister is an Average Politician, and Gardner is being neither too critical nor too generous in that assessment. Stephen Harper is very good at finding ways to back popular policies without alienating too many of his supporters (the recent shipbuilding contract process is a good example).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dan Gardner provides a handy way to scale the achievements of politicians: The central dilemma facing any elected politician is this: What is good is often not popular and what is popular is often not good. Most politicians want to do good. But in order to do anything, good or otherwise, they must first hold […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,28,53],"tags":[86,188,591,258],"class_list":["post-11802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-media","category-politics","tag-criticism","tag-electionwatch","tag-hlmencken","tag-stephenharper"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-34m","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11802"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11802\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11804,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11802\/revisions\/11804"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}