The United States has had two engineers who were presidents--Jimmy Carter and Herbert Hoover. Neither of these presidencies are generally considered "successful," whatever that means. Jimmy Carter's announcement that he has cancer has brought him back into the public eye. If you watch his public announcement of his diagnosis, you will see an amazing mastery of technical detail. (He said he had a tumor of 2.5 cubic centimeters in his liver and the doctors removed 85% of it. He later describes in great detail the medicine he is getting and what it does.) When Carter was president, Saturday Night Live did a skit picking up on this tendency of his. Stuart Eisenstat, one of Carter's aides has a piece in the New York Times arguing for all the positive achievements of Carter's presidency. He writes: Trained as an engineer, he sought comprehensive solutions to fundamental challenges through a political system designed for incremental change; his significant successes never quite seemed to match the ambition of his proposals. Politics is often called "the art of the possible," but Carter never trimmed his program to what was deemed politically possible. One analysis of Carter's presidency says that his approach was to "to study a problem from every conceivable angle, arrive at the correct solution," and then tell the Democrats in Congress to pass it into law. That did not work very well. Are the skills of an engineer fundamentally at odds with the skills necessary to be a good politician?
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