[VLM]

Thought experiment:

As a culture we've been pretty effective lately at electing miserable disappointing failures to public office. This seems a relatively uncontroversial observation, and note I'm careful not to name any names so as to not appear biased toward one side or the other of the one coin we've been dealt.

Precondition 2 is everyone has social media accounts where they say stuff no one cares about, constantly. The CB radio of this decade.

Precondition 3 is anyone planning an assassination is smart enough to self censor and say nothing about the entire topic.

Given the above preconditions, the only rational conclusion is 99.9% of the population will continually be whining and complaining, and you can focus your attentions on the 0.1% who are at least considering doing something bad enough to self censor.

So the thought experiment is Obama comes to visit a city and the guy who gets a SS visit is the only guy in the whole city who's not rambling on in social media about "Kenya" or "Can't believe I wasted my vote on him" or writing racial slurs or "he broke every campaign promise" or whatever.

[cstross]

Disagree. As a culture we have developed public offices that are structured to prevent anyone who might be elected with a mandate to effect change from doing so. The iron law of bureaucracy applies: after the first generation most of the staff of any organization see their job not as pursuing the mission statement of the org but as preserving their own jobs. Attempts to change things generate resistance from within because, hey, jobs might be threatened. Hell, political candidates who might challenge their party's ability to win future elections by accomplishing change (which might be unwelcome to some elements of the voting -- or election-buying -- public or oligaarchs) are weeded out before they get a chance to run for office.

The "disappointing" incumbent is merely a printed-paper face on the front of a machine. Which some loons choose to use for target practice. Resulting in the existence of a vast reactionary bureaucracy dedicated to extirpating threats to printed-paper faces.

[mcguire]

Do you by any chance know any elected officials or career civil servants?