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Should Jon Stewart run for POTUS? No.
Would I vote for Jon Stewart if he ran for POTUS? Probably.
This says less about my faith in Jon's ability to govern, and more about my lack of faith in current politicians to lead ethically.
I'd rather see Jon make the right decisions but make mistakes, than to see a seasoned politician make the wrong decisions and execute them competently.
I at least have faith Jon is smart enough and with a true compassion in his heart, that he'd be able to surround himself with real experts, listen open mindedly to their advice, and regularly make decisions with empathy.
All that said, he's said repeatedly he doesn't want that job, and I do not blame him.
To second this, I'd like Jon to keep doing the great work he's doing, and I'd like people with similar levels of integrity and thoughtfulness who are interested and good at political activism to rise through politics and lead.
It's a sad state of affairs in which we ask these questions, because it's just an indication that we're myopically focused on people with enough name recognition to discuss them.
You know who would be better considerations for president? Katie Porter. Ro Khanna. Maybe eventually Lina Khan. Despite what we're told, there ARE people with experience leading political agencies who have shown an understanding of the back doors that have been built into our power structures and show the integrity to fight against it.
The funny thing is that when people think about potential populists for president, we get options like AOC (who I admire, but is famous more than experienced), but we don't get enough people like Barbara Lee, who is the only member of congress who said "NO" to the PATRIOT Act, the War on Iraq, and the Authorization of Use of Military force that gave us the war in Afghanistan and our whole permanent war in the middle east. The woman is an absolute lion of courage and has decades of experience. She's currently running for Senate, and she has my vote because she's the only one in the race calling with the courage to call for a ceasefire in Palestine.
I love Stewart. But we need to look past the famous towards the people who've been quietly doing this work for many years.
That is the problem with representative democracy when each rep accounts for nearly a million citizens. You're at the whims of such a massive voting base. Name recognition is pretty much the only thing that matters at that scale.
It's like modern marketing and advertising. Half the time, they don't even say anything about their service. They just want you to remember the name and recognize the logo if you see it in a store.
Jon is a smart man. If he were to become President, he would have to make the same kind of hard decisions that Obama made that were unpopular among the public. Being a world leader is like that ethics question of changing the direction of a train to run over 1 person vs 10.
No one that wants that job should be allowed to.
For that very reason, I sometimes imagine a world where public office is handled like jury duty, picked semi-randomly.
So many people only ever listen to comedians. Nothing more insightful than a 5 minute tirade with a little clip show will get through lol