Watching this year's bailout debates in the U.S. Congress and the Congressional/Presidential campaigns on C-SPAN has convinced me that American citizens have got to stop choosing our elected representatives based on any criteria other than their qualifications to run a complex government in an even more complicated world.

Many of us vote for candidates based only on personality and whether they make us feel good about ourselves or are people we would like to invite into our homes. Instead, what we need are techno-nerds and policy wonks.

We owe our well-crafted democratic form of government with its cleverly designed system of checks and balances, to a weird bunch of policy, technology, and scientific wonks and nerds such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and Alexander Hamilton.

These guys and their compatriots were the kind of wonks and nerds, who, when presented with a problem and a complex system to analyze and possibly replicate, threw themselves into learning as much about it as possible. Some were best at policy, and others were best at technology, and some, like Jefferson and Franklin were outstanding contributors to both. 

But today - because some of them did not exactly have winning personalities and others had personal morality issues - few would have little chance of getting elected. Which is a shame because not only did they have the desire, education and life experience to deal with  such problems, they also had what Walter Lippmann - a premier political journalist of past decades - called "civic virtue.,"

No matter how doubtful their personal morality or different their personal beliefs, their allegence to the principles of our civic culture - the various freedoms, the Constitution, an abiding belief in representative democracy, and an ingrained impulse to be of service to their fellow citizens - was pristine pure.

They were also able to put aside, for a while, their passionate adherence to particular ideologies.  And because they were not "true believers," they were able to come up with commonly agreed-upon compromises, the essence of effective representative democracy.

We now desperately need a new generation of such wonks and nerds to repair our delicately balanced system of government which has been crippled through our mis-directed passions and either/or advocacies.

And while these wonks and nerds are at it, maybe they can come up with a set of self-regulating checks and balances to protect our financial system from our own worst instincts, modeled on what our "founding nerds and wonks" built into our U.S. Constitution.

The wonks and nerds we need to run for political office and take direct control are out there. Some I see working within government advising the politicials, such as engineering nerd and ecomomics wonk Neel Kashkari, the interim assistant secretary in the U.S. Treasury assigned with the responsibilty for managing the financial bailout. Others I meet at the embedded system design, science, and technology meetings I attend and write about.

Many of you are satisfied and busy with the work you trained for. Others may have a complete disdain for politics and politicians. But remember our representative democracy was designed as a "goverment OF the people, BY the people and FOR the people." 

The reason politics has become an object of contempt is that we have let our government become one of, by and for politicial careerists, lawyers, and lobbyists. If you don't want to run for office, at least rethink the criteria by which you elect people to political office.

What do you think? Read Jack Ganssle's insightful and thought-provoking Break Point column on "Electoral Polls and Engineers," and leave your comments there. Also, take time to vote in the Embedded.com Poll on the Home Page. The question this week: "Who's your Presidential candidate?"