Referring to President Obama’s first 2 weeks in office, Sen. Lindsey Graham said in an interview this week, “Having lunch is not leading … and doing TV interviews is not leading.”
Now, for all the smug sniping about Republicans acting like sore losers, if you take take a step back and look at what’s really going on, he’s right. Campaigning for something isn’t the same as leading the effort to get the work done, as any smart manager will tell you. Oh, sure, a leader’s role is to be the more public “face” of those who follow, but if that leader doesn’t have a clue about what their followers are doing (the work) or become addicted to the public visibility, then you end up with burned-out, flattened companies watching in dismay as their “leader” sails off into the sunset on their golden parachute.
Kinda like what just happened with Wall Street.
Suspicions at first then become doubts, it should now be quite obvious that President Obama didn’t have a clue about what he was getting into when he decided to run for office. If you look at how he spent his pre-election “public servant” adult years, the sum total of which consists of an entire, decidedly short political career out and about humping about on one campaign trail or another (despite assuring his Illinois constituents in 2004 that he had no intentions of pursuing anything else in 2008), when you look behind the glam the media has foisted on him, Barrack Obama has frighteningly little experience with the real nuts and bolts of the tasks required of our elected officials. He can parrot back the theories but doesn’t know how to apply them to real life, and now we hear complaints of “exhaustion” surfacing after a mere 2 weeks in office. Poor guy; I’m sure it’s exhausting to try and make sense of the utterly unfamiliar.
In the real world, the truth is that most of us who still have a job are chronically exhausted working at them. But we aren’t getting at least some small consolation by being able to dine on Wagu beef in a nice, toasty office.
An interesting tidbit that helps explain the strange, self-serving mindset of far too many of those who are supposed to serve us in Washington is found in an statute enacted by Congress in 1856 that calls for lawmakers’ pay to be docked if they missed work for any reason other than an illness of their own or of a family member. The rule was never enforced, of course; though in 1906 it was taken down off its dusty shelf in order to make a point, and in 2005 the Senate cunningly exempted its members. For better or for worse, the House of Representatives has not yet done so.
This essentially means that you can get yourself elected to a job in Congress, get paid $169,000 a year, and then do whatever you want, whenever you want, without fear of losing your job before the end of its “contract”. You can even focus the majority of your efforts on finding another, even better-paying job without any repurcussions except perhaps creating negative public opinion for yourself. Which, if you have thick enough skin, is little more than an annoyance, a distraction from the ultimate goal of getting the most (ego-boosts, money, take your pick) for the least amount of effort, a buzzing little fly to be brushed away without thought.
It is this, then, that is the sum total of our president’s Washington experience and the substance of his qualifications for office. And you wonder why this country now finds itself festooning the south end of a north-running horse?
If the statute were to be enforced, based on attendance records of many, many of our elected officials, it would provide another tidy little revenue stream to add to the back taxes suddenly coming out of the pockets of Obama nominees.
But you won’t hear anything even remotely resembling anything like that. It smacks too much of accountability. No, indeedy; we’ll just do what we know how to do best – lead by continuing to campaign for change.
Buddy, can you spare a dime?