Guy goes up to the counter of his favorite fast food joint: “Uh, I’ll take a double cheeseburger, hold the pickles, medium size fries, a diet, and while I’m here, would you take out my appendix?”

Odds are, while the burger, fries, and diet order may stand a 50-50 chance of ending well, the chances of a successful result in removing the appendix are not good.

As we place our orders for the next several years’ worth of national leadership, congressional as well as presidential, are we running a similar risk of selecting candidates who are ill equipped to deliver the goods that they will be elected to deliver?

In the current Republican presidential field, leading candidates Donald Trump, Carly Fiorina, and Ben Carson, between them, have zero days of experience as elected office holders. This is seen as a virtue.

President down through district representative, being seen as an outsider untainted by the Washington strain of political Ebola is seen as a positive. Inexperience is to be praised. Experience equates to being irredeemably tarnished political goods.

How often do we heard the complaint: “The problem is the politicians!” “Government is lousy with them. If we could only get rid of the politicians, the republic would be much better off?”

Could it be that the problem is not that we are electing too many politicians, but rather too few of them to make the republic function as intended?

Huh?

It depends upon your definition of “politician.” I prefer the one out of the Merriam-Webster dictionary:

 1: A person experienced in the art or science of government:

            one actively engaged in conducting the business of

            government.

Measured against this standard, it is apparent that a “politician” is something more than someone who holds a political office. A politician is an individual who is able to identify and expand areas of agreement and is willing to negotiate the rocks and shoals of the legislative process in order to influence the outcome of any given issue. Such is the “business” of government.

Have we been electing politicians?

I would argue that we have not.

Since at least 2010, we have increasingly been electing ideologues committed to a particular point of view to the exclusion of all others. To these folks, negotiated compromise is not the essence of the political art or science of governing. It is its bane. As one one recent (unsuccessful) senate candidate from Indiana put it, “My idea of bipartisanship, frankly, going forward is to make sure we have such a Republican majority in the U.S. House, the U.S. Senate, and the White House that if there’s going be bipartisanship, it’s going to be Democrats coming our way instead of them trying to pull Republicans their way.” When there are others with differing, but equally strongly held, positions on matters of public policy, such an all-or-nothing attitude is a prescription for gridlock—which is what we have.

The main cause for the gridlock in Washington, I submit, is not politicians, but ideologues holding elected political office, who are not politicians under the above definition

To a significant degree, we, the people, are responsible for the mess in which we find ourselves.

As Lincoln said, ours is a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” I think this means that our elected government was reflective of what the people wanted at any given time in our past, or will want at any given time in the future.

What about the present?

Sad to say, we seem to want a government that pretty much leaves us alone to watch reality TV, or cheer for our favorite team. We essentially want a government that runs things to our liking without any conscious effort or investment on our part to make it so.

We have little tolerance for candidates who would engage our minds. We reward those who engage our emotions. The more inflammatory the better. Red meat to the masses.

Do we really believe more of the same will bring about positive change? As they say, insanity is doing the same things over again, and expecting a different outcome.

The legislative process is a slog. It was intended to be such by the Framers of the Constitution. The idea was to require much deliberation and debate. Nothing was to happen precipitously. Sweeping change was suspect. Incremental change was encouraged, and all sorts of considerations were to be crammed into the mouth of the legislative grinder, and accommodated, before a final product came out the other end.

Too many Americans are drawn to the purveyors of great slabs of political red meat. What we need in these challenging times are more folks who know how to make sausage.

We need more, not fewer, politicians.