WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY

Consider:
If you had spent 30 years building a business which is now worth $10 million, and you feel it’s time to kick back a bit, but you hadn’t done as good a job of succession planning as you should have. Now you have to go outside to hire a CEO.  The first person who comes for an interview is a young, handsome, articulate, black man named Barack Obama. During the interview he tells you he has never run any kind of business, only managed a couple staff people, has never had to operate under a budget, never collected a private sector paycheck and will not give you any references or show you his college grades. How inclined would you be to entrust your business to him?  Yet we gave over the reins to the most powerful country in the world with 313 million “employees” and a budget in the trillions to just such a person.

Why, because our system is such that if you believe in Liberal philosophies and you would like to see those philosophies implemented throughout the land, you have to vote for the Democrat candidate, same with the Conservatives. We only had Romney to vote for. Romney had all the knowledge and experience to financially save this country, but not much personality. Liberals had Obama, Mr. Personality plus, but not the slightest workable plan on how to get us out of the financial mess that Bush’s end of term liberal spending got us in.  I thought the voting public would go with the expertise over the personality, but I was wrong.

This country is sorely in need of a leader, the person who gets things done (but how could we expect that from President Obama when he's never had any leadership experience. We knew that and elected him twice anyway--that's our fault). This last sequester fiasco is a good example of this lack of leadership. Whether he could have personally done anything or not, I’m sure could be up for debate, but his plan seemed to be to get in front of the TV cameras, where he is most comfortable, and has conducted most of his presidency, and scare the snot out of the people about how this 2% reduction in Government spending would reduce the quality of everyone’s (except the politicians’) lives. Then, at tax payers’ expense, he whisks his wife and daughter off to ski in Colorado while he goes on an expensive (not to him) golf vacation, comes home and spends a total of 56 minutes with the leaders of Congress.

Again, could he have actually done more?  Could meeting with the leaders locked in a room with a tub of Jack Daniels and some big, old Cuban cigars (with a couple of cigarillos for Speaker Pelosi) and not coming out until they had reached an agreement, have produced “something?”  I guess we’ll never know, but that complete lack of involvement would be enough to get the Board of Directors of any competent organization, recognizing their mistake, to boot him out on the street, or at least require he attend a Leadership 101 training class at the local community college.

We obviously have no score card for our Presidents. We seem to rely on the intelligence of the electorate (apparently not the best move by the framers).Business has objectives for their custodial staff (how may waste baskets to empty, toilets to clean etc.) but we don’t have them for US Presidents. Then when it comes time to “renew their contract,” what criteria do we use?

We’ve seen what happens when effectiveness meets popularity in the voting booth and it’s not pretty.