Experience and David Brooks

David Brooks, the conservative op-ed columnist for the New York Times, has a piece today about experience, politics, and governance wrt the Presidential election. In "Why Experience Matters" he is pretty damning about the choice of Sarah Palin as a vice presidential candidate, stating:

In the current Weekly Standard, Steven Hayward argues that the nation’s founders wanted uncertified citizens to hold the highest offices in the land. They did not believe in a separate class of professional executives. They wanted rough and rooted people like Palin. I would have more sympathy for this view if I hadn’t just lived through the last eight years. For if the Bush administration was anything, it was the anti-establishment attitude put into executive practice.

And the problem with this attitude is that, especially in his first term, it made Bush inept at governance. It turns out that governance, the creation and execution of policy, is hard. It requires acquired skills. Most of all, it requires prudence.

What is prudence? It is the ability to grasp the unique pattern of a specific situation. It is the ability to absorb the vast flow of information and still discern the essential current of events — the things that go together and the things that will never go together. It is the ability to engage in complex deliberations and feel which arguments have the most weight.

How is prudence acquired? Through experience. The prudent leader possesses a repertoire of events, through personal involvement or the study of history, and can apply those models to current circumstances to judge what is important and what is not, who can be persuaded and who can’t, what has worked and what hasn’t. Experienced leaders can certainly blunder if their minds have rigidified (see: Rumsfeld, Donald), but the records of leaders without long experience and prudence is not good.

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I bring this up not to convince you to vote for Obama, but because this is relevant to local politics and governance, especially the need for "prudence." I was an an e-debate on a local list, and I finally bowed out, because the person pulled his usual stunt of saying how he focused on equity and the local, experience and theory be damned, and by extension, that I didn't care about equity or the impact on real people, which is b.s.

But this kind of narcissistic self-referential belief that you can learn from no one or no place, and that your situation is unique and has never been experienced anywhere else in the world ends up not going very far and almost certainly means (continued) mediocrity and unless you are possessed with amazing insight (which tends to not be associated with narcissism), you aren't likely to move the discourse, issues, and practice forward.

Experience just doesn't have to be in politics and governance. Community organizing, despite the derision of people like Rudy Guiliani and Sarah Palin who focus more, I guess on "business community organizing," not people-resident-neighbor community organizing, is good practice too.