Talking is What They Do

Tyler Cowen has a post on a phenomenon that I’ve been pondering:

As the primary elections are coming up it is interesting to note that so many of the contenders are lawyers, something that is also true of the members of Congress, where I believe half are lawyers. Why are so many US politicians lawyers?

Vis-à-vis the race for the presidency, the question should be more specific: why are the Democratic contenders all lawyers? The professions of the leading candidates before they entered politics are:

Democrats
Hillary Clinton, lawyer
John Edwards, lawyer
Barack Obama, lawyer

Republicans
Rudy Giuliani, lawyer
Mike Huckabee, minister
John McCain, naval officer
Mitt Romney, investment banker

This contrast between the parties’ leading candidates is not surprising. The attorneys’ bar pretends to be impartial but law is one profession, like mass media, entertainment, and academia, whose members overwhelmingly gravitate to the Democratic Party. I’m going to posit some reasons--just based on my limited experience--about why lawyers tend to be liberals and/or Democrats, but I do believe them to be true.

Lawyers have superior verbal skills and can out-debate intelligent people, such as engineers, doctors, and bankers, who’ve chosen other professions. Because they win every argument, lawyers believe deep down that they are smarter than everyone else. The reason that government hasn’t solved most problems is that too many conservatives have been in charge; conservatives are too dumb (just look at their policy positions) to run government, and besides, their heart isn’t in it anyway. (A Republican President can’t decide between managing the Department of Education or abolishing it.) Lawyers believe that through sheer force of their intelligence they will succeed where others fail.

But being the leader of a large organization is a humbling experience. Brilliant speechifying or looking good on the front page of the New York Times is not sufficient to make you successful. You have to learn to delegate, motivate and monitor your employees, most of whom don’t want to work 24/7 on your pet causes. You have to balance your resources between achieving long- and short-term objectives, all the while hoping that a 9/11, a bird flu epidemic, a Hurricane Katrina, or a financial markets crisis doesn’t hit you from left field and everyone asks why you weren’t on top of it.

But all you have to do is assemble a good team, you say? But if you haven’t had a lot of experience hiring and managing, your instinct might be to hire people in your own image, i.e., other brilliant lawyers and academics. However, these people are not accustomed to subordinating their egos to work in the hierarchical executive, much less suffering the fools who will be reporting to them.

I’m not saying that a lawyer can’t manage the Executive branch or that because a President went to Harvard Business School he’ll be an effective Executive. Management experience is just another element for us to consider---albeit one that I deem important---and why I’m disappointed that New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson and former Vice President Al Gore are not in this year’s race for the Democratic nomination. © 2008 Stephen Yuen