I agree, the president should be the best we can get, but infortunately we don't elect people to be good at the job. The nature of elections selects the person who is best at elections at that moment. Sometimes that person happens to be really competent but that seems to be the exception and not the rule.
I'd like to think this is a problem with American voting specifically, or maybe first past the post election systems, but I worry that this is the trend of democracy as a whole. It seems like all democracy is sliding that direction, and I can't think of many safeguards in place to resist it.
I sat with it for a moment, and I think parliamentary systems do seem more resilient since they require experts to be appointed or hired to do the real work, while the elected officials are steering the general direction. That falls apart of course when the appointed experts are selected for reasons that have nothing to do with expertise.
I don't know what a solution to this is, and I think that is by design too, though it may just be the way the human brain works, I don't know. It's very hard to imagine new ways of doing things that are very different, and it's even harder to see a clear path to that different future. I'm hopeful because good people are working on it, but I'm worried because the problems are so titanic.
You're probably right, I said that with no data to back it up, only personal experience. I grew up in a relatively large metro area in the rust belt, and our city council made up of pizza shop owners, lawyers, car salesmen, and the like gave up so much to try to attract Walmart to town. It fell through but in the process the council bulldozed a very large neighborhood for the project. The professional staff, in this case the City Manager, was strongly opposed to the project, due to future loss of local business, but the council proceeded anyway.
I would argue, though, that being short sighted about the economic health of communities does imply some level of incompetence on behalf of the local government. They could encourage new local small businesses by starting an incubator program, or offering subsidies for business with less than a certain number of employees. They can find the money to subsidize Walmart and that money isn't ever coming back, whereas the money spent locally does.
To counter myself on that, maybe that's only short sighted because we're looking back and it's obvious in retrospect. Conventional wisdom at the time Walmart was expanding so rapidly may have been, "more big business means more tax revenue means more nice things for the city."
Edit: Sorry, I didn't realize this was two weeks old, it feels like just a couple days ago