@Muse - I have interacted with a lot of elected officials. Most are dummies who are really good at chatting-up voters. I've met and worked with some who are great - like Zoe Lofgren, Tom Campbell - but they are exceptions.

Working directly with legislators or their staff can be hard - it's hard even to get in the door. On both voting system matters and ICANN I did get through the doors. After about a year working together one US Senator even let me write questions for him to ask other witnesses at a hearing where I also testified. And Tom Campbell and I walked the Capital Mall in DC for a couple of hours while we chatted about the basis and structure of internet governance.) California's Secretary of State came to my house to chat over open voting matters.

(I can't express the joy that I felt when at one hearing I got to put down a Senator who was being oppressively jerkish and condescending. I think I saw angry steam come out of his ears.)

It was fun in that my employer at the time, Cisco, was really jealous that I seemed to have some better contacts into Congress and the media than the company's professional lobbyists.

On the other hand, I remember a dinner with a Senator's staff at a very fancy Pennsylvania Ave watering hole and restaurant. It was like a West Wing with the sign bit flipped - there was a lot of physical touchy-feely stuff. I was surprised that the female waiters at the restaurant refrained from slugging the staffers, or pouring drinks in their laps; they would have been justified.

There is also a lot of fear among legislators and many others that technical things are so delicate that any change will collapse the universe as we know it.

Had I taken that job at NTIA I would have been the President's liaison to Congress about early Internet issues. (My job interview was to rewrite a presidential position paper on computer privacy.) I've always regretted that I had to turn it down because it would have uprooted the career of my significant other.

My concern about lack of expertise - often coupled to an unwillingness to acknowledge that one lacks understanding of an issue and to take the time/effort to learn - is more intense down at level of citizens who have a life to lead in addition to influencing policy. I often run into people who are so lacking in education that they do not comprehend the difference between our criminal and civil legal systems.

@Muse - Wow, trying to come up with computing/tech policy must have been hair raising. Not just the policy but also the task of expressing it in ways that can be understood by non tech people.

Policy design is hard!!! Writing it down is hard too.

But the hardest writing is legislation. Wow, that is hard. The biggest one I did was an anti-smoking proposition that may have ended up on the California ballot (it was so long ago that I really don't remember.)

When I did that job interview in which I rewrote a presidential position paper I began by tossing the prior draft almost entirely. The old draft was too detailed and left too many voids that would become loopholes. So I began with broad principles and then punched very selective holes. (I did this all at a bar on K Street in DC - all handwritten.)

I once proposed a kind of language to be used for writing statutes and contracts - my notion was based on formal programming languages. And for parts of statutes/contracts that are repetitious I wanted textual subroutines that could be invoked with parameters. It was an idea that never got off the ground.