Well, parties *have* fractured in the US before, also. It's just been a while.

Either she's just confessed to being unqualified to do anything requiring discretionary judgment and emotional intelligence or she's revealing that she thinks everybody listening is completely stupid. Which is another kind of disqualification in a politician.

I think it's the basic idea of neoliberal leadership transferred over to government. Advance via seniority after an initial "meritocratic" hire, maintain the institution but avoid discussions of values or purpose, prize incrementalism in a quasi-spiritual way, and refuse to believe in adversaries.

There's a lesson in there that we're reluctant to learn, which is that it was a mistake to invest that labor in that way, because it lulled us into believing that institutions are machines that run in a certain way once you've built them enough in the right fashion.

Yup. He's smart, he's got smart people around him, so I'm going to assume that they know this is coming. One thing he needs to do is make sure that Tri-State elected Dems all line up behind big projects and to throw a bit of gentle shade on anyone who doesn't.

It's really striking is where "long experience in politics" ought to translate into "don't make certain kinds of dumb mistakes that have been made over and over again". It rarely does come out that way. If anything, the more experienced you are, the more likely you are to fall into those traps.

But I think empirically if you were going to create a big spreadsheet of mayors, governors and presidents and assign them "experience in politics" scores and index that against "effectiveness and accomplishment" scores, my instinct that that the two scores would have weak relatedness at best.

I do think it's important for people who head executive departments, have seniority on legislative committees, or who are in the circle of advisors around an elected executive. That's where you want people who've been around the block a few times, though even there some fresh blood is important. 4/

In political leadership, at least--and I suspect in organizations generally--a long resume based on steady movement up a hierarchy for a person who started in politics in their late 20s or 30s is not really good evidence of competent leadership. 3/

Seeing political leadership as a product of experience in the sense of a professional resume has been a core part of Democratic politics since the 1990s--it shows the deep embeddedness of a neoliberal vision of meritocratic hierarchy structured around seniority for all professional elites. 2/