James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 6, 2012 (election day)
A READER WRITES:
I was attracted to an article by the word "attractor," but I found something even more interesting buried within it. Towards the end of the first page the author basically argues that, immediately after the election, the President and the Congress get together and perform The Front End:
So What If on Wednesday November 7th - the day after the election – our next elected President called for a radical new approach to governing where the President and Congress govern according to a shared vision, mission and objectives they come together to agree to within the first 100 days in office? Just rid ourselves of governance through opinion polling and lobbyist control and require our leaders to work together. If they don't agree, then the President (by Executive order) triggers government shut down. Can you imagine that?
I appreciate your sentiment but fail to share your confidence that all will turn out well in the end.
We have two candidates that have spent a combined total of some $2 billion, and as historian David McCullough put it on "60 Minutes" Sunday, neither the president nor his challenger has told us a coherent story.
It got me to thinking, why? They are both decent men, but decent men must display leadership qualities congruent with the times. It is there where I have a problem.
We needed a George Washington to create the template of what a president should be. For his remarkable restrain and stable personality, David McCullough sees him as our greatest president. He could have been king; Europe was still run by monarchs. He could have been president for life, but he chose to be president for two terms and then retired to Mount Vernon.
We needed an Andrew Jackson who was “Old Hickory” in more than namesake. He was tough when many in the eastern establishment still looked to see if their reflection in the mirror still resembled Europe.
He took on the Second Bank of the United States, and Senators Clay and Webster, and in the process established the imperial presidency. The Age of Jackson followed. His leadership was for the times, as the nation was expanding westward, and the South was already promoting states rights as if the federal government had no authority or role in the matter. Jackson clipped John Calhoun’s wings, and the Civil War was put off for a generation.
We needed an Abraham Lincoln when the Civil War became a necessary chapter in the American experience. He used the imperial presidency effectively to push through the “Emancipation Proclamation” and win that war. Lincoln was draconian or dictatorial when it was called for, and took command of the Army of the Potomac when General George McClellan faltered. He had an iron fist but often wore velvet gloves that were necessary to romance Congress when it brooked his will.
Name a critical time in our American history and a FDR or LBJ surfaces.
These flawed men demonstrated the leadership needed for the times.
Different leadership is required when the times change, like now. It is a different world, a world it would seem no one understands. We have become a drifting society, a disconnected society, a society that welcomes the freedom to be left alone which has contributed to the drift, a society that wants to be told everything will work out in the end, when the evidence suggests otherwise. We want others to tighten their belts as long as we don’t have to tighten ours.
* * *
I see President Obama a dreamer and Mr. Romney a mechanic.
The novelistic style of Obama’s story of his father is that of a dreamer, someone who imagines a life that words could make real. Author Michael Lewis saw the president as an exhilarating and combative man on the basketball court, but author Bob Woodward didn’t see that same exhilarating and combative man dealing with Congress.
The president could suck up his energy and play it back as if a gift to those on the basketball court, but was disinclined to do so with Congress. He is more Plato’s philosopher king than a president spoiling to tangle in the muddy swamp of Congressional internecine politics.
Mitt Romney’s success with the Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah, his success as governor of Massachusetts, as well as in his success in management consulting and the investing business are all aspects of the mechanic.
Clearly, he is a very good mechanic. The mechanic designation is the best description of executive leadership since WWII. The corporation that rose out of that war is a well-tooled enterprise in which all the designed pieces are engineered to fit to perfection.
That was fine when the corporation resembled an erector set, a skeletal structure in which all the bolts were secure and the assembly held fast. When gravity loosened the bolts, and the system seemed to totter, not to worry, new reinforced rubber threaded bolts were installed.
If this metaphor seems absurd, take a close look at all the reengineering schemes over the past decades and you will see the relevance. Temporary was written large on all these schemes, as no one wanted to face the fact that work was changing, that management as meddler was a luxury that no longer could be afforded, indeed, the relevance of top heavy corporations had become anachronistic.
The rubber threaded bolts of Congress are the lobbyists for special interests in society, promulgating the idea that they make everything more secure, more economical, and better, when anyone can see that is not the case at all.
The granite foundation is gone. In this nightmare of the last six months with the constant crackle and cacophony of campaign ads on television, on the web, in our mailboxes, we have not so much absorbed the candidates’ ideologies as to catch the infection that lay beneath them. They took away our quiet with slogans and promises so that our world has become more driven by instinct than reason.
We have gone from an agrarian society to an industrial society to information society and now to a society that has less to do with mechanics and mechanical nomenclature and more to do with string theory, where atoms don’t behave as expected, nor do we, and where nothing is what it seems, and therefore isolation and control in the normal sense is now only chaos.
Chaos today is the byword, and chaos needs to be embraced not avoided. Can a dreamer or a mechanic latch unto this concept? God help us if they can’t.
Be always well,
Jim
* * *
No comments:
Post a Comment