Conventional wisdom and dinosaurs

Dinosaurs existed for millions of years, and conventional wisdom would suggest they would go on in their future as they had in the past. And then the world changed, and so did they.

It is fair to say today’s world of politicians is full of dinosaurs, but America today has more than its fair share, albeit being fed by the politicians who feed them with public taxpayer money or raised money. Little personal wealth of the politicians is at risk.

Conventional wisdom of the dinosaur-like hired political managers and media managers and their hired pollsters and focus groups is that the world of the past several decades will go on forever. Their survival instincts, as in generating income to pay their bills, are based on the relatively recent past decades. This past includes run from the left and right in the primaries, go to the center in the election run, there will always be only two major national political parties, the voting public is too dumb to remember the facts, and mass communication skills, as in propaganda, will substitute for ideas and debates in front of the voting public. Even sponsors of the so called debates participate in what questions can be asked. All too often social security and immigration are not even discussed. This is the world of political dinosaurs advising federal presidential candidates.

Add in the 535 Congressional seats, 435 every two years in the House of Representatives, and 100 in the Senate on a 1/3 every two years basis, and the federal world is ready for change, to include their hired staffs. This change is not as much idealistic as it is selfish by the voting public. The representatives and their staffs have taken their cut at the public’s expense and priorities for now decades. National interest seems like a quaint idea for those that mine our national treasure. Spoiled self-confident Americans mimic this. We can borrow our way out of selfishness, and have our children pay for it. Now it is time for payback, though in America it is better said that the world has changed, the voting public will show it in the vote, and America will be better off. And the political dinosaurs will die off.

How it will all end one does not know. Like Robert Frost’s poem, it may be fire or ice. Or it may be a new national party, or term limits for the congress. But it will be a new world, and the dinosaurs will have died off, again. As before, they just don’t know it yet.