Forecasting more cold, dead hands

My thoughts on the Andrew Sullivan post saying gun purchases have rised dramatically under Obama:

http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/09/obama-is-better-for-the-gun-industry-than-perry.html


I was a huge Mayor Bill White fan when he was running for Texas Governor.

I think when visible administrators don't resemble their populations in ways salient to the population, it gives power to legitimacy hecklers. So there can be tension between best available administrators and the easiest ones to legitimize.

Bill White reminds me of an Obama level technocratic administrator who better resembles the American population -thus I think he'd be an easier face to neutralize legitimacy hecklers.

It's hard to gauge the cost of Obama legitimacy hecklers regarding things like demands for birth certificates, which seem almost costless. But increasing guns in society seems to me to plausible increase social risk (I'm not an expert my intuition is that's the empirically derived expert consensus).

It's a repugnant conversation to have openly, but the ideal (which doesn't seem to me to be that asymptotic) is to have highly able technocratic administrators that sufficiently resemble the populations they govern. Bill White would have been an awesome Governor and President, in my opinion.