Homo Politicus ≠ Homo Wonkus
I’m always amused by the bien pensant recoil at politicians who don’t have Kennedy School-level mastery of policy details. You’d think the last half-century of American politics hadn’t seen candidates like Jimmy Carter, Michael Dukakis, or Al Gore, wonks all who knew more about policy than your average PhD, yet whose intimacy with the arcana of state was somehow insufficient to propel them to—or keep them in—the White House. Or Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, whose relationship to policy details was, how shall we say?, attenuated, yet who nevertheless managed to completely rearrange the political furniture of our lives. Maybe, just maybe, mastery of policy detail does not a successful political actor make. And if you think Reagan or Bush would have been less disastrous as presidents if they knew the details of what they were doing, I suggest you pick up any introductory text on the workings of political ideology. To understand theirs—and yours.
As it turned out, Bernie Sanders really didn’t botch that interview with Daily News, which has prompted this latest wave of policy tut-tutting in the media. And his answers about Dodd-Frank and banking regulation were basically right. That said, he does seem to be relatively clueless about the transhistorically significant fact that New Yorkers pay for their subway rides with swipe cards rather than tokens.