Trump and Clinton — like every presidential candidate before them in my lifetime — are products of a grueling and demanding multistate, multimonth evaluation process. And yet it’s hard to say that this process, for all its demands, is doing a good job at finding good presidents. Instead, it filters for people who are good at winning primary elections, which doesn’t have much to do with actually governing as chief executive. (In fact, given how different primary electorates are from the general public, it’s not even especially good at filtering for people who are good at winning national elections. Mike Dukakis won the 1988 Democratic nomination, after all, and Bob Dole was the Republican nominee in 1996.)

In my lifetime there have been a number of lousy presidents, and few really good ones. A company that consistently picked leaders whom many people disliked, and whose performance was often poor, would probably reevaluate its selection process. Maybe we should do so, too. But how?

We could limit the presidency to people who have been governors. That way, everyone involved would have experience as a chief executive. (It would also have the advantage of making senators focus on doing their job instead of running for president, as so many of them do from day one — so even if it didn’t produce better presidents, we’d probably get a better Senate).