If you believe this you will always get a technocrat with a great resume who has spent years enforcing the status quo, and, once elected, will do nothing to change it. If you want anything to be better you need to move away from gatekeeping "qualifications" because they are always bestowed upon proponents of business as usual by proponents of business as usual. What does "smart" mean? They went to Harvard and are therefore best buddies with the ultrawealthy and elites of society? The pundit class says they're smart? Rarely, once in 200 years, you'll get lucky with this approach and land on a class traitor and hero like FDR, but you're actively selecting away from that on purpose.
For a leader, you want a strong vision for the future, passion, a very strong will, charisma. It's ridiculous that people obsess about "intelligence" or "qualifications" -- Obama was brilliant and supremely qualified, how did that work out for us? We picked a constitutional law scholar who continued and made permanent all the constitutional violations of the Bush admin. Friends with the very intelligent economic experts on Wall Street and able to recognize their expertise, he let them run his cabinet and bail themselves out and let them pillage our country's economy.
Oh yes I agree strong leaders like I've described with the power to change society can be bad. Change is not always good. But a qualified technocrat will not ever change anything much, for better or for worse. Why change a system that worked perfectly for you? That you thrived in? Where you can do a bunch of spreadsheets in your off time comparing private insurance plans and cleverly pick the best one for you and save money, and if you screw up, your child's hospital visit isn't covered and you are instantly homeless! How fun! If you want change, don't pick the Harvard valedictorian "wonk".
They will suggest policies like: what if instead of feeding the hungry we define a specific income bracket adjusted dynamically to the purchasing power parity of... and in the first three words you've already lost 99% of the population who thinks it's unnecessarily complicated because it is: they're turning a moral issue into a technical one because they've been trained to do technical analysis and to not see things in moral terms, rather, to shift numbers around in spreadsheets. They are wholly incapable of stepping back and recognizing that the spreadsheet itself is wrong, not technically wrong, but morally wrong: that simpler is better, that universal programs (like roads, NHS) are better than means-tested ones, that these things which are simple moral imperatives should be able to be explained simply.
Yeah, it's a good thing that the world isn't all that complicated and that all of our problems can be solved with simplistic, well-intended platitudes.
I voted for clinton, would describe myself as almost neoliberal, and love technocrats... but was kaiser willhelm really the kind of leader you describe, or was he more of the "elite club of eliteness" kind? (I am genuinely not familiar with the history, but I suspect the conventional narrative on the rise of fascism overplays the importance of the demagogue in plunging the entire world into war)
For a leader, you want a strong vision for the future, passion, a very strong will, charisma. It's ridiculous that people obsess about "intelligence" or "qualifications" -- Obama was brilliant and supremely qualified, how did that work out for us? We picked a constitutional law scholar who continued and made permanent all the constitutional violations of the Bush admin. Friends with the very intelligent economic experts on Wall Street and able to recognize their expertise, he let them run his cabinet and bail themselves out and let them pillage our country's economy.