I only see Koy's posts when somebody makes the mistake of quoting him, but my God, the line about choosing a President being no different from hiring a competent applicant to do a job based on their resume is just dismally depressing meritocratic slop.
Why?
Because the qualifications for being good at a job are to carry out the functions of that job efficiently and without question, not to ask whether those functions should be different. You don't get hired by challenging the way things have been done, you get hired by accommodating the established norms. What makes someone an attractive candidate from the perspective of a hiring manager looking at performance metrics is not the same thing as what is good for the majority of people, and only someone who is basically insulated from the failures of American economic and foreign policy has the luxury of treating the situation like a job interview. And, of course, all the characteristics that are regarded as valuable for an interviewee are decided by such people, not by the poor, or by minorities who have been shut out of the political process for decades, or by the victims of military aggression abroad, or by young people who see an uncertain and chaotic future for themselves. They can all just shut up and get in line, because The Politics Knower has laid out a bulleted list of attributes that HR has decided are important for a president to have, and if we find such a candidate, all we have to do is make sure they are elected and everything will work out.
This frames the problem of politics as a matter of getting the right individuals into positions of power, rather than the problem of giving power to larger numbers of people who currently don't have any. It's inherently conservative, because the only criteria for evaluating a presidential hopeful through the lens of hiring someone to do a job is whatever the job has entailed thus far. Treating elections this way therefore solidifies the status quo, rather than questioning it.
