Politics is NOT "Public Service"
The more I think about it, the more I resent people (Beltway types mainly) who think that their career aspirations somehow do the rest of us a favor. It's even worse when I see it from Republicans.
Apparently the Bush administration has offended Republican Party establishment types by not letting patronage get them all the good jobs. At least
Tucker Carlson is offended (thank you
Kaus), and he of course is the only Republican establishment type who matters. That's why his CNN program did so well! (
Spin Room, was it?)
Guess what? Jobs are really really hard to get these days. The White House is no different. I have connections at
Google and I'm dead certain I'd do at least as good a job for the search engine as any random Washington Insider would do for good government. But I go through the same application process everyone else does.
They have a great point about the application (here
app means both "form to fill out" and "piece of software") being hideously slow.
whitehouse.gov has been
butt-slow basically ever since the birth of the Web. Not sure how much good some software developers would do. Some servers would be a godsend but politics has crapped over so much of the procurement process anyway.
Sun's servers would probably be the best thing but I wonder which party their execs give to.
(Silicon Valley types give way too much money to the Democrats. It's because the first thing they thought of was civil liberties issues and only belatedly realized that the GOP is the party whose economic principles are much more in tune with giving them the
freedom to succeed. This is infuriating for two reasons: Both that nobody realizes how bad-for-the-economy the Democrats are (Clinton was a fluke, dovetailing with the Internet and being reigned in by the GOP Congress, a situation he subsequently took credit for when it worked) and that nobody on my side realizes how badly the perception of out-of-date social views kills us.)
My roommate, who desperately needs to either figure out what he's doing with his life
or have someone tell him (it's been nearly five years since he quit grad school to become Silicon Age's first employee), has been talking lately about volunteering for one of California's Republican gubernatorial candidates. He asked me if this sort of thing would interest me
and was incredulous when it didn't.
First off, contrary to the way-too-much-time I spend on various blogs, I actually have
very little free time. As soon as
my favorite trivia question supplier is ahead-of-schedule on the next five packet sets or so,
maybe I'll have room for such things. But more importantly, people who base their whole careers on politics seem (to me) to lose some crucial perspective.
I do not trust --
ever -- anyone who's spent his whole adult life being paid by taxpayers.
Get a real job first and only then will
I consider voting to pay you. This applies to all political parties.
Also, I'm sick of electoral bean-counters assuming that any California Republican is by definition some sort of savior. This crashed and burned with Pete WIlson. It didn't even (really) work out with Chris Cox. I knew people in college who were (figuratively) madly in love with him, people who thought he'd hit it big on the national scene. Well... I'm waiting. Patiently. I still don't know him all that well, though what I do know makes me think, "I'm glad he votes the way I want him to," rather than, "hey cool, he can lead us into battle."
Blah. Gray Davis is probably the next California governor. He's had the attack ads rolling for about a month now. Will some watchdog reporter job all over him for "
going negative"? He's not a Republican (since everyone knows
only Republicans "go negative") so don't hold your breath.
