COVID-19 Outbreak (Update: More than 2.9M cases and 132,313 deaths in US)

Sun Wukong said

I was talking to a friend the other day about how, in general, the skills required to get elected to office are pretty much only applicable to get elected to office and don't really qualify or prepare you to do anything required of the actual job. A lot local officials are pretty incompetent at their actual jobs because the "interview" (election) process has nothing to do with actual qualification unless you're running as an incumbent. And even then it often only somewhat factors in. It's a weird way to choose leaders, but I'm not going to pretend to have a better idea.

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This is true, and it's amplified with local officials. By the time you make it to the state or federal level, you've been involved at some level with some type of crisis. At a bare minimum, you have some idea of how to pull the right levers to get the right people or resources.

To your point, getting elected as a local official is really about appealing to a very small constituency on a personal level. That skill set is worthless in a crisis. Very few, with the exception of a few mayors in really big cities, have ever been involved in running an organization the size of a city government let alone any type of crisis management.