When it Comes to Presidential Candidates, You Can't Please Us Americans

From Kevin DeYoung on the Republican debates (forgive the white background, I don't know how to get rid of it).

"The debates over the past months, and the election in general, exposes a number of inconsistencies about Americans.

• We want to be rich and want politicians who will promise to make us richer. But we don’t like our politicians themselves to be wealthy.

• We want candidates to give straight answers and not dodge hard questions. But when they give specific answers to hard questions their answers will be ridiculed as dull or will be held against them.

• We want our leaders to be super confident, super competent, and super intelligent. But we hate elites.

• We want the president to be one of us and above us and unlike us at the same time.

• We want someone to be an effective executive in the labyrinth of legislative, judicial, bureaucratic, military, and diplomatic tasks that face the modern President. But we also want him to be a complete outsider with no experience in how any of that works.

• We want politicians unsullied by the real life tradeoffs, lobbyists, and interest groups of politics. But what they are like in the rest of life doesn’t really concern us. They can compromise in everything but politics."