Where did all the Republican experts go? Posted by Shadi Hamid

I'm sure some of you have already stumbled on David Brooks' recent column on McCain's governing philosophy, or lack thereof. This sentence, in particular, jumped out at me:

There simply aren’t enough Republican experts left to staff an administration, so he will have to throw together a hodgepodge with independents and Democrats.

Can this really be true? If it is, where did they all go? There are a couple possibilities: a) the current crop of Republican experts are getting old, and there aren't enough younger experts to replace them, b) there were never many Republican experts (relative to Democrats) in the first place, or c) so many of them got disillusioned by Bush/Rove/Cheney that they filtered en masse into the private sector. I don't know. I'm not an expert on Republican experts (is anyone?). But I will say this - if you're a budding "expert" in your 20s or 30s and are thinking about your political future, it probably doesn't make a whole lot of sense to explicitly identify yourself with the Republican party, even if you are fairly conservative.

And I suspect you're going to see a lot of semi-conservative twenty and thirty-somethings leaning Democrat or at least holding their nose and leaning Democrat for the foreseeable future, simply because being Republican probably isn't so good for your career these days. On the other hand, if Republicans are suffering from a lack of experts, as Brooks claims, then I imagine a young Republican who actually knows his stuff could rise pretty quickly in the conservative think tank world and establish a name for him/herself.

Comments

[J]

No, what I think Brooks was getting at here is that, after two terms in office, pretty much any Republican "expert" who wanted a Schedule C appointment in the Executive Branch has received it. Thus, there is a certain level of burnout/fatigue among Republican political appointees that would be a challenge to a McCain Administration looking for fresh energy.

Indeed, this is a larger problem -- the Republicans have controlled the Executive Branch for 20 out of the last 28 years. That means a huge gap in the numbers of Republicans who have accrued Executive Branch experience and left the Democratic side at a disadvantage. As a former Committee staffer, I can tell you that the Republican side always had it easier finding witnesses because there are more former bigwigs on their side.

I doubt people are gaming their affiliations on the basis of who's in politically at the moment. The two parties are so different that you can't really fake enthusiasm. Indeed, if there is an Obama Administration, I think we all need to brace ourselves for heavy losses in the House and Senate in 2010. It's the nature of our political system.

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