The Wrong Debate: Salespeople, Operators, and Innovators

The problem with modern presidential debates is they’re testing candidates on the wrong skills. We should be testing whether they can innovate.

We have another presidential debate tonight that will once again test the candidates on the wrong skills. We’ll assess who delivers the best quips, who prepared more clever sound bites, and who can repeat better staff-written policy proposals everybody knows no one will implement. We’re testing the abilities of salespeople.

This is a high-stakes moment. Our parties are collapsing, we face dangerous and unfamiliar problems, and the world is shifting underneath our feet. This isn’t the time for sales-oriented leaders hawking plans everyone knows don’t exist. We need to test these candidates on whether they have it in them to innovate.

The Three Kinds of Politicians.

There are three different kinds of politicians: Salespeople, Operators, and Innovators.

The vast majority of politicians are salespeople. Their expertise is selling a party ideology and agenda. They’re not policy entrepreneurs, experts, or wonks. They don’t develop, or often even fully understand, the product they’re selling. They take the sales sheets of Republican, Inc. or Democratic, Inc. and sell them to the public.

This is because raising money and running for office is mostly a sales job. The people who excel at these tasks enjoy shaking hands, kissing babies, and delivering canned speeches to wild applause. They trust that, after they win, others inside the party machinery will do the magic to make the party vision they’re selling work. They’re natural salespeople.

The problem is, while winning elections is a sales job, running a government is not. Making policy, developing ideas, implementing programs, and driving the direction of America are about designing the product. It’s not great that most politicians are both uninterested in and terrible at the true purpose of their jobs.

In normal times, this division of labor only functions because the ideas are already in place and the biggest remaining job is selling them to America. The product, liberalism or conservatism, was developed decades ago. Smart people working outside the spotlight are using those ideas to craft the agendas politician go out and sell. As long as the salespeople win and vote for the plan others developed, America more or less stumbles through.

In times of national change when those plans are outdated and we must innovate, it’s no longer good enough.

The second group of politicians are the operators. Operators are the political equivalent of corporate executives. They’re talented at implementing things and getting things done. Operators aren’t as skilled at getting elected as salespeople. Once they secure power, however, operators are amazing at turning power into action.

Lyndon Johnson is the classic operator. Johnson wasn’t an intellectual or ideological pioneer. Nevertheless, he managed to pass both the Civil Rights Act and the staggering array of policies that made up his Great Society. These were ideas other people developed but that Johnson, an operator, made happen. He could do this because he was a relentless executive obsessed with securing a legacy of concrete accomplishments and, after years as Senate Majority Leader, was exceptionally skilled in twisting arms and getting laws passed. Other operators include Dick Cheney, George H.W. Bush, and Richard Nixon.

In ordinary times, operators can be amazing. The parties have big ideas and the chief challenge is implementing them. Operators get that done. The problem with operators is they aren’t people of big ideas themselves. They depend on someone else developing the plan they implement. They’re not innovators.

The final category is political innovators. Innovators change the direction of the country. They see the big picture and rechart the nation’s course around new ideas. Salespeople sell ideas. Operators make ideas happen. Innovators figure out what to do.

Innovators are exceedingly rare in politics. The classic innovator was Theodore Roosevelt, famously a cowboy, a soldier, and force of nature, but also a scholar and man of big ideas. In midlife, he walked away from politics to spend time in the Dakota Territory exploring, reading, thinking, and writing articles and books. As President, he committed to ending the corruption, injustices, and inefficiencies of the Gilded Age and attached himself to the new ideas of the Progressive Movement to create his Square Deal that permanently changed the direction of America. Innovators, however, aren’t always wonks or intellectuals themselves.

Franklin Roosevelt wasn’t much of a policy man or intellectual, but his presidency was built around innovative policy and big ideas. He understood policy, ideas, and innovation were critically important to getting America out of the Great Depression so he delegated power to a Brain Trust of scholars, thinkers, and policy entrepreneurs and gave them free reign to innovate to solve the crisis. That created the New Deal and the modern Democratic Party. Ronald Reagan also wasn’t a great intellectual, but he was a believer in the importance of ideas. He built his presidency around bringing the conservative movement’s intellectuals, locked out of the establishment, into government to end the crisis of the 1970s. That revolutionized the Republican Party and changed the direction of America.

Most of the giants of American politics who never made it to White House were great innovators—people like Van Buren, Clay, and Bryan. Add in people like Robert La Follette, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Bernie Sanders, and even Andrew Yang.

You don’t have to be an intellectual or wonk to be an innovator. You need to care about innovation, policy, and big ideas.

MAKE THEM DEBATE INNOVATION

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have long careers as political salespeople. Trump is obviously a salesman, as he would be the first to tell you. He was a media-savvy businessman, spending more time in the pages of newspapers than in boardrooms. He became a reality television star. His presidency centered around his rallies and pronouncements. Harris rose in politics as a media star herself. She’s been a telegenic party regular whose agenda reflects the moment. She’s never been a policy entrepreneur or a wonk.

We don’t need a nationally televised debate to find out which of these candidates is the better salesperson. Do we really need to find out which can deliver the best zinger? Do we need to know which can deliver the better sound bite created by their staff? Do we need to know who looks more “commanding” as an actor shaking their fist and repeating canned lines on stage? Who cares?

Debates focused on these trivial matters were appropriate in regular times because the policy stakes were known. The parties were defined. Their agendas were established. As I explained in my last piece, we used to know what the Republicans and Democrats believed—and no longer do. The only thing left to talk about was whether the candidates could sell it.

Debates back then were about selling well-known agendas to the public. That’s why we cared about who looked presidential. It’s why we wanted to see who could tell a joke. We wanted to test presidents to see whether they had the polish and gravitas to stand for our country on the national stage. Watch an old debate like the one between Reagan and Carter, or between Nixon and Kennedy, or even between George H.W. Bush and Clinton. These debates were often riveting and substantive because the big ideas were already figured out. We already knew the what and the why, which provided us the space to freely debate the how.

This focus makes no sense in an era in which the big ideas are up for grabs. We’re in an era of political breakdown. We face perplexing national challenges no one seems to know how to solve. We face serious national divisions. People are legitimately angry. Where is our country heading? Are we even going to be okay? There’s no Republican or Democratic Party boilerplate to fall back on because neither has credible solutions to our current problems. Does it really matter who looks nicer, who is more funny, or who is better at memorizing soundbites and policy snippets to repeat by rote on screen?

It matters, to be sure, if the candidates are competent enough to talk about policy. It matters if they have the gravitas to stand up to rival leaders. People want to know whether Trump is as sharp as he once was. They want to know whether he still has the fire to be president. They want to know whether Harris has real knowledge of policy and government and whether she think on her feet. They want to know whether she can command and lead. We should test these things and, if the candidates fumble, it will hurt. However, what we really care the most about is whether they have innovative ideas to get America to a better place.

Can either become an innovator?

Do they recognize the seriousness of the moment? Do they believe policy is important? Do they care about ideas? Do they have fresh ideas about how to adjust the ship of state into a new direction? Will they call on brilliant minds like the New Deal Brain Trust or Reagan’s conservative intellectuals to design new solutions? Can they become a Reagan or an FDR? In a time of national crisis, do they have what it takes to innovate?

This is no time to be picking salespeople. We need to discover whether these candidates can innovate. Debating anything else is just entertainment and a waste of precious time.

Are these candidates innovators? Join the conversation in the comments.