Podcast: Democracy: The voters verdict

There's an old joke about a couple who finally solved years of arguing over decisions. "Since you're the man of the house," the wife said, "you handle the big things -- our stance on foreign wars, who we send to the Senate. I'll take care of the small stuff: groceries, the mortgage, where we live, what we eat." The husband agreed happily, certain he had won the better half of the deal. A few years later he realized the trade had gone entirely the other way. He held forth on geopolitics at dinner parties while his wife quietly ran every detail that actually touched his life: what he ate, where he lived, how his money was spent. What looked like ultimate authority was, in practice, near-total abdication over the things that shaped his days.

Voters make the same trade, and pay for it the same way. We keep hiring leaders for the qualities we would want in a spouse -- warmth, charm, a commanding voice, the sense that they see us -- instead of the qualities we would want in a mechanic: someone who can find what is broken and fix it before the whole system fails. We evaluate candidates the way we choose intimate partners, not the way we hire people to run complex, high-stakes systems.