Some presidents have talked the talk and walked the walk.
Barack Obama talks the talk and walks the links.
This isn’t a comment on how many vacation days Mr. Obama (or any other President) takes. We know that all modern Presidential staffs are in constant contact with the mother ship no matter where POTUS himself happens to be.
This is a comment on how disconnected Mr. Obama is. He gives good speech. Kind of. With a teleprompter. But he sure isn’t much on follow through.
“If he walked on water,” my friend Lido Bruhl said, “you’d complain that he doesn’t get his feet wet. And that TelePrompTer canard is so 2008.”
Heh.
Here’s talking the talk. A (baker’s) dozen times.
Housing Meltdown:
Create a foreclosure prevention fund for homeowners. Fail.Jobs:
• Create 1 million new manufacturing jobs by the end of 2016 and working to double American exports. Fail.
• Stand up for American workers and businesses by combating China’s trade practices. Fail.Security:
• Develop a Cyber Security Strategy that ensures that we can identify our attackers and a way to respond. Can you spell Snowden? Fail.
• Close Guantanamo Bay. Fail.Veterans:
• There were 400,000 claims pending within the Veterans Benefits Administration, and over 800,000 expected in 2008. Fail.
• Make the VA a leader of national health care reform. Fail.
• Create a veterans job corps. Fail.Healthcare:
• Close the “doughnut hole” in Medicare. I still have one.
• Expand eligibility for Medicaid. Not in Florida or 23 other states.
• Move the U.S. health care system to standard electronic health records that providers can share. Not in Vermont or most other states.
• “Help up to 40 million, no 30 million, no 15 million, no 7 million, no 7 people get health insurance.”
• “If you like your plan…” Any other questions?
To be fair to my pal Lee, no politician keeps his campaign promises. In fact today, no politician even plans to keep her campaign promises.
To be more fair to my pal Lee, my rug-chewing friend Rufus had the same love affair with Glenn Beck as lefty loons have with Mr. Obama.
“What Beck does surely is news,” Rufus told me. “He has asked the questions I have been asking for months, and he has turned up some answers. I’ve never seen Beck make a statement without sources.
“Of course, I also like a six of Becks Premium light (64 cal /12 oz),” he said in that 2008 exchange.
That’s wrong, too. A 64 calorie slightly alcoholic soda pop isn’t beer.
The only purpose of a news show is to report the answers. Mr. Beck delivered perhaps five minutes of answers leavened with 18 minutes of advertising and 37 minutes of high volume rug chewing.
That ain’t news.
In fact, all that is is rousing the rabble.
Still the usual Liberal approach to
sing Lalalalalalalalala …
say the science is settled …
or point Oh, look! A squirrel!
and to scamper away does even less for a rational discussion than quoting Mr. Beck (or Keith Olbermann). All that is is rousing the rabble. Sound familiar?
Too many Liberals use the political scientific method: Have an idea and think it’s perfect. Find data that backs up the idea. Conclude it was a great idea and never needs changing.
We can do better.
We could apply the actual scientific method in government: Observe a problem and wonder about it. Do research and gather data. Have an idea. Experiment and gather more data to test the idea. Analyze that real data and draw a conclusion.
Oddly, that could even work on Facebook.
What fun would that be? We’d lose all the Liberals and have to cannibalize each other.
“We could apply the actual scientific method to governance: Observe a problem and wonder about it. Do research and gather data. Have an idea. Experiment and gather more data to test the idea. Analyze that real data and draw a conclusion.”
For more than 20 years I made my living teaching corporate and nonprofit boards how to govern. The “scientific method” Herr Blogmeister suggests is a great *management* method, but it is not “governance”.
No further comment.
George picks a nit. It is indeed a nit he is qualified to pick since he (literally) wrote the book, School Board Leadership 2000: The Things Staff Didn’t Tell You at Orientation, on it.
Still, governance means “all processes of governing, whether undertaken by a government, market or network, whether over a family, tribe, formal or informal organization or territory and whether through laws, norms, power or language.”
Broadly, that means it includes all the “processes and decisions that seek to define actions, grant power and verify performance.”
Methodology, whether scientific or political, is a process.
Broadly, that means it includes all the “processes and decisions that seek to define actions, grant power and verify performance.”
That’s good management, but not good governance. If a governing board did those things it would not need a CEO to manage because they would be doing it themselves. They could then call themselves “The Board of Managers” and save a lot of money.
No further comment.
— George
A governing board does not equal governance. A governing board (any board) determines the overall direction and strategy of a business or governmental entity. Managers hire the worker bees and oversee the day-to-day operation of the business or governmental entity.
Governance, on the other hand, is all of those administrative and get-er-done pieces that go into governing, or in this case into running a government. Governance is process-oriented and strategy oriented. Hence the disagreement.
All that said, I’ve changed “governance” to “government” up there so as not to confuse my readers further.