If there’s one thing I know about American politics, it’s that Michael Dukakis destroyed everything he touched. While his ineptitude during the 1988 presidential campaign allowed the founding of the dynasty of Bush presidencies, and thus continues to haunt us, he did lasting damage to our democracy in another way as well.

When he accepted the Democratic presidential nomination at the convention in Atlanta, Dukakis famously declared, “This election isn’t about ideology. It’s about competence.”

I have an unsettling idea. What if, for decades now, we’ve been thinking about presidential campaigns all wrong? We like to refract our presidential campaigns through the lens of competence: Clinton has it, Obama doesn’t, Romney has it, Giuliani doesn’t, Gore had it, Bush didn’t, etc.

So let’s pause for a moment and ask a simple question. What is competence? Quite literally, what is the definition of that term, as we apply it to presidents? It’s a lot slipperier than it seems.

There’s an immediate urge to point to the catastrophes of the last seven years as the obvious price of incompetence. We (sort of) chose an incompetent candidate, the argument goes, and we got predictable results: A disastrously managed war, a ruined national reputation, a struggling economy and the population of a major American city surrendered to a hurricane.

The hard truth, though, is that there is a factor besides incompetence that can ultimately explain all of these calamities. It has been a matter of ideological choice, not effective management, that has dictated whether efforts of the federal government will succeed or fail. The Bush administration did not make a genuine or organized effort to save New Orleans. The city was quite literally abandoned to its fate; the decision was made years before the hurricane struck, when FEMA was purposefully gutted by officials who dismissed the value of any bureaucratic agency. Michael Brown was indeed incompetent, but it’s no accident that agencies like FEMA are stocked with cronies like Brown. Bush and Cheney were surely under no illusion that the former lawyer for the International Arabian Horse Association (he resigned in disgrace from that job too) was qualified to handle one of the most difficult logistical tasks in federal government.

Likewise, the morass in Iraq is not the result of a good idea badly implemented. Rather, we got where we are today because of national leadership that adheres to a particular ideological worldview, consisting of an unwavering belief in the moral rightness of projected American power. The administration, blinded by ideology, was unable to recognize that not everybody shared their views of American power, that we would not, in fact, be welcomed with hugs and roses. Hence the problem in Iraq wasn’t that they came up with a great idea and proceeded to handle it badly; it was that they came up with a terrible idea that they were convinced was great. No amount of competence can compensate for deluded ideology.

Nor is Bush the only president whose failures are attributable to his ideology rather than his abilities. The basic ideological premise of the Clinton presidency, after all, was that he was a Democrat who was a little bit less of a Democrat than others. Clinton campaigned for reelection in 1996 on the promise to be inoffensive. His basic strategy, termed “triangulation,” consisted of the argument that he had none of the bad qualities of either party. It’s hardly surprising, then, that while we can remember the 90s as boom years, it’s hard to point out many lasting Clinton accomplishments.

There’s always a lot of talk about “doing the job” and “getting it done” in the presidential campaign. This begs the question, “What job, precisely, will you do? What, exactly, will you get done?” Running the country is not like running a corporation or even like running FEMA. While a CEO has only one official job — increasing the value of his or her corporation — presidents create their own missions and reshape the office in their own images.

At fault here, ultimately, is the pretense that ideology doesn’t matter and the recurring desire to take the politics out of politics. But splitting the difference between the parties does not always yield the best answers, and so-called “responsible” and “serious” centrism will not necessarily bring competent, satisfactory government. It’s a technocratic idea, and, deep down, it is a fantasy of handing off to well-trained experts the responsibilities of democratic participation. The awful obligation of democracy — choosing between ideologies — can be overwhelming. But it’s a choice that we have to make, and to pretend otherwise is, in the end, to wish that we lived in Plato’s Republic, ruled by philosopher-kings.

I never thought I’d say this, but the person who put it best was Dukakis’ 1988 opponent, George H.W. Bush: “Competence makes the trains run on time but doesn’t know where they’re going. Competence is the creed of the technocrat who makes sure the gears mesh but doesn’t for a second understand the magic of the machine.”