Click here for an article in The New York Times by Peter Wehner (who served in the last three Republican administrations) entitled "Seeking President, No Experience Necessary."
People who would never board an airplane piloted by a person who has never flown before, or even used a flight simulator, apparently want to elect as president someone who has never served in public office.
It was a huge shock to Republicans when Obama was reelected in 20012. Wehner says this was a psychological blow like that suffered by Democrats in 1984 with the reelection of Reagan; could be, but I find a more recent parallel in the 2004 reelection of Dubya. Okay, he stole it in 2000 with the help of his father's Supreme Court, and Kerry was an unappealing candidate -- but Dubya??!
... by 2012, President Obama was viewed by Republicans as a complete failure whose repudiation was inevitable. The fact that he easily won re-election, with 332 electoral votes to Mitt Romney’s 206, was a huge psychological blow to Republicans, much like the one Democrats experienced in 1984, when Ronald Reagan — despised by many liberals — won re-election in a landslide.
When the Republicans swept the House and Senate in 2014, low-information Fox News voters were led by demagogues into believing that the policies Obama's administration had enacted in the previous six years would be undone; they have reacted with impotent rage against the Republicans they elected, who of course were constrained by the checks and balances of the U.S. constitution. Without a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, the Affordable Care Act can't be repealed, as some lying politicians promised; neither can the legislation legalizing gay marriage or the executive order on nuclear weapons with Iran (which lying demagogue politicians, pundits, and hate radio jocks are characterizing as Obama having handed Iran The Bomb).
The way this has worked itself out is in rage directed at Republican lawmakers. Many on the right refuse to recognize the institutional constraints that prevent lawmakers from doing what they want them to do, which is use their majority status in Congress to reverse the early achievements of the Obama presidency. One telling example: Advocates for the 2013 government shutdown insisted that doing so could fully defund the Affordable Care Act, when in fact no such thing was possible. Obamacare’s subsidies are an entitlement whose spending levels are not set by the annual appropriations process, meaning a shutdown could not unilaterally defund or eliminate it. No matter; with Republicans in control of the House and Senate, the Obama agenda was expected to be undone root and branch. The fact that it could not be undone created fury.
Hence the popularity of Trump, Carson, and Fiorina.
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