Politicians, for all their screwups, ARE actually endowed with an above average education.

It's a serious mistake to confuse education with intelligence, and especially common sense. Check out the crop of Yale and Harvard graduates in government over the past few years.

Of course, the idea is to have an actual election with several picked candidates, which should help weed out any stinkers not filtered out by the selection process. Naturally, term limits are an important feature of this idea.

Most people will have spotted a major flaw in this concept: under our current type of government, the end result could be a permanent "behind the throne" group of unelected bureaucrats handling the elected people, and seeing that nothing really changes. That too would have to be dealt with, but I haven't really thought it through to that extent.

Key to any form of organizing a government is to try to prevent dynasties, keep offices from being held permanently, and, most of all, keep it from accumulating too much power. Needless to say, those actually IN government tend to develop exactly the opposite opinions.