That's an interesting experiment, and those are good points. I'm reminded of the importance of making a good first impression because we evidently judge books by their covers even though we're not supposed to do so. We know better, but as Adam Curtis has pointed out, politics has become too complicated because it's technocratic. Even politicians leave the management to the experts they delegate the issues to. No one can understand them all, which means we trust in the system we've built to manage itself. All you need is an engineer hanging around to turn some dials now and again, to tweak and optimize the system.

Sheldon Wolin explains this, too, in his chapter on organizational liberalism, in Politics and Vision. And Thomas Frank's account of corporate Democrats is consistent with this point: the progressive idealists are out to lunch because they're radicals and don't understand that the neoliberal system is supposed to be self-regulating. So politicians are irrelevant, and elections and the attendant culture wars are for show. It's political theater, which gives extroverted phonies the advantage. But is modernity self-governing or is that a faith-based, secular conceit?