Tuesday, July 19, 2016

Political Thought

The whole speech controversy concerning Trump's wife got me thinking about the larger issue at hand. And yes, this is going to be about Hamilton, but I have reasons for it.

Alexander Hamilton wrote almost all the time. He wrote letters, he wrote papers and theories about things. While he probably wrote more than most of our founding fathers, he was by no means the only one who wrote quite a lot.

Politicians rarely write their own speeches anymore. They rarely write their own blog posts or, hell, even their own Tweets. Often these things are composed by professional writers and looked over by focus groups.

I get why people would be nervous about this. One need only look at Sarah Palin to see how damned stupid one can sound without a speech writer (at least, I hope that woman doesn't have one.)  Still, I think one of the major reasons why our politicians always feel fake and rarely do anything worthwhile is because they've stopped being political thinkers and become, well, really boring actors.

In an age of such rabid levels of media, I can see why this could be dangerous. On the other hand, wouldn't we be better off with people who really showed us they were thinking about the issues and trying their best to make sense of them?

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