Jim DeMint is resigning from the U.S. Senate to become President of the Heritage Foundation.  Almost everyone has a strong opinion about this.  Some of the comments are very illuminating.  The following article from the Washington Post is an example:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/12/06/jim-demint-and-the-death-of-think-tanks

“He’s not known for bridging the worlds between academia and politics, the way Reps. David Price (a former political scientist) or Rush Holt (a former rocket scientist) are.”

(Both Price and Holt are extreme left wing liberal democrats)

A bridge between “academia and politics,” is actually a bridge between nonsense and reality.  Academia is incapable of actually solving problems.  George Bernard Shaw explained this in “Man and Superman.”  He writes about a man who was discouraged because his writing teacher said his novel was hopeless.  The response was:  “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” 

The cultured elite are often too blinded by their own arrogance to recognize true brilliance.  Abraham Lincoln was despised by the intellectuals of his time. When Lincoln was, grudgingly invited to make a few remarks at Gettysburg, he was politely informed that the “Oration” would be delivered by a far more capable man, Edward Everett:  Everett spoke for over two hours with a 13,607 word oration.  A short example follows:

“Standing beneath this serene sky, overlooking these broad fields now reposing from the labors of the waning year, the mighty Alleghenies dimly towering before us, the graves of our brethren beneath our feet, it is with hesitation that I raise my poor voice to break the eloquent silence of God and Nature. But the duty to which you have called me must be performed; — grant me, I pray you, your indulgence and your sympathy.”^[

Lincoln needed no more than 270 words to give one of the most famous speeches in history.  Few people even know the names of those who considered him to be so inferior.  True brilliance is not in the eloquence of words or the sophistication of academic research.  It rests with the man who figures out what to do and then does it.  The really brilliant man is the one like Ronald Reagan who summed up the cold war in one sentence:  “Here’s my strategy on the Cold War:  We win, they lose.”   Reagan was too busy defeating the Soviet Union to realize that people much smarter than him were trying desperately to explain why this could never work.  .

Our economic problems are not nearly as complex as academia and the Washington Post would have you believe.  They do not require political scientists to develop carefully nuanced and sophisticated programs that strike the perfect balance to keep the world in harmony.  What the academic world fails to understand is that if something is perfectly balanced it doesn’t actually move.  You can’t accomplish anything if you can’t move.

Jim DeMint is no an academic, but he gets it.  There is probably no elected official who understood the core principles of the Tea Party movement better than DeMint.  He had no patience with moderate Republicans and they had little patience with him.  I suspect he has accepted this new position for one obvious reason.  He knows that one of him in the Senate can accomplish very little, but if he can help get conservatives elected all over the country, he can have a major impact on this country.

I hope he is right.  We could use a little more cream DeMint in congress.

TDM