I really don't know a lot about Jeb but whenever I see him, he doesn't come off as being very confident, seems wishy-washy and almost looks like he really doesn't want this.
Excellent timing because right as I was reading through this thread and got to your post, I was
just thinking about how our political process ensures that we elect leaders who are overconfident boobs.
Specifically, I was thinking about Ben Carson because I saw him ramble on idiotically about evolution a little while ago.
Ben Carson is a smart guy. I'm sure there's a lot of stuff he knows a great deal about.
He knows basically nothing about evolutionary biology. (Edit: That's an overstatement on my part. He knows a lot of details. He totally misses other details, as well as the big picture, though.) There's nothing wrong with being ignorant about certain things, including biology. (It's a
little weird for a surgeon, but whatever.) We're all ignorant about plenty of stuff. So he's ignorant about some aspects of biology -- not a big deal in itself. The subject probably doesn't come up very often in the Oval Office, so I don't think it would be much of a handicap for a President.
But what a person
should do when he's ignorant about a subject is just shut up about it and defer to people who know better. He should
not make confident pronouncements that all the experts in the field are wrong. He (obviously) hasn't read a single good textbook on the subject of evolution, yet he knows more than all the Ph.D.s put together?
That's disturbing.
Personally, I don't want a leader who just blusters through on every topic he's ignorant about. I want a leader with some humility, some ability to accurately estimate his own confidence interval on various propositions, some appropriate awareness of the possibility that he's wrong and others are right --
not someone who makes rash, cocksure decisions from a position of ignorance.
And yet ... I don't think our political process will ever let anyone through who
isn't an overconfident boob. In a debate, in response to a difficult foreign policy question, imagine a politician who answers: "That's a hard question. I don't have enough information at the moment to give you a good answer. I would need to confer with my advisers, study our intelligence -- which I'm currently not privy to -- study the expected outcomes in a number of possible scenarios, and then make a probabilistic assessment of the least bad course of action, cross my fingers, and hope for the best. But it's a difficult situation that probably doesn't have a perfect solution." Then imagine Trump's likely answer about how we're going to forcibly impose peace on the Middle East and make them pay for it, or whatever, and guess who's going to get more support.
There's simply no room in politics for people who are intellectually honest enough to admit their own limitations. Everyone has to pretend to be an expert on everything so often that they stop pretending and start believing it themselves. And that's not going to lead to good decision-making, IMO.
I'm not criticizing jamny's instincts here. I think it's human nature to want a charismatic leader with a strong personality and no wishy-washiness about him. But when it comes to evaluating Presidential candidates, I think that's probably an unfortunate aspect of human nature, at least in some ways, rather than a fortunate one.