Alana Goodman makes an excellent point about Ron Paul’s disinterest in finding out who wrote racist and hateful material in newsletters put out in his name. There’s a larger point, though, that the episode demonstrates: Ron Paul may want to disassociate himself from his newsletters.
Hence his excuse that “Twenty years ago I had six or eight people helping with the letter, and I was practicing medicine, to tell you the truth, and, I do not know” [who wrote them]. So here we have a candidate whose attempt to sidestep the controversy seems to be that his focus was elsewhere. Eight people exceeded his ability to supervise and yet, as president, he wants to supervise thousands?
I’m not attached to any candidate, but if there is one lesson we can draw from President Obama’s tenure, it is that the United States cannot afford a commander-in-chief who has no management experience.
I read some of them at the TNR site. Basically, they are like a suck-o version of the kind of thing lewrockwell.com does now, which is right leaning libertarianism. There are some particularly ill advised forays into racial matters which I think Murray Rothbard had written that he was interested in, uh, exploring. Thankfully those elements have left and the right/libertarian style has been tuned up alot. They've wisely focused on economic and foreign policy stuff, the most popular of ron's positions, and left the Buchananite stuff to…Buchanan, takimag, va dare etc
WTF? If he signed it, he wrote it. n nWhat kind of an ass makes excuses 'Someone else wrote it, I just signed it' n nReminds me of Obama sitting in Wright's church for 20 years. 'I just sat there. I never heard him say it. Now that I want to be president, I repudiate it. Let's move on.'
Management experience is the wrong point to make, Michael. God help us if Obama were a better executive and could implement his horrible, ill intentioned ideas with more efficacy! An Obama with management experience would be a double disaster. Don't you see that?
BDZ n nBrilliant – I never looked at it that way – guess we have something to be grateful for as regards O
And then there's the stuff Ron Paul says…today, on Alex Jones and before audiences and in interviews when he isn't stomping off the set. Like Bradley Manning is a patriot. And the government is one big CIA coup. And the feds one day will build an electric fence to keep us IN! Don't think that the Buchanite stuff, domestic wise and foreign-policy wise is left to old Pat (who, like the Paul circle was really taken back by those bongo playing fools in Dupont Circle). Why do we "keep sending soldiers and money to Israel?" Why indeed. All.those.soldiers. Not only has the ship done sailed on the hazy contours of Paul's belated nostalgia for an America that never made it past the Federalist Papers. The whole fleet pulled up anchor, smoke receding on the horizon, but apparently the dream lives on for some. Chasing that fleeting empyrean glimpse of absolute liberty. Ah America, ever on the road to Graceland.
OK, point on "no management experience" well taken — but then, I am reminded of the night that the sky really was falling. 6 tons of it at least, a "Big Dig" ceiling panel that fell onto a car and killed a woman. But for fate, it could have fallen on a school bus a few hours earlier….And the immediate investigation to rule out terrorism and whatnot came back with a "no, and you gotta shut everything down *right now* because there is one next to it about to fall and we don't know how many more unsafe ones there are." n nGovernor Romney had to close not one but *two* Interstate highways — I-90 from Boston to the airport and the North/South I-93 through the city itself — and this wasn't a planned closure with detours but a row of police cars across all lanes at the last above-ground exits and hoping for the best. And for those who think that the streets of DC are confusing, you ain't never seen Boston where more than a few of the streets were laid out by cows walking to the Common in the 17th Century. n nRomney had no choice, he had to shut it all down until it could be inspected and the portions that were safe reopened. He needed to hire a lot of engineers in a hurry — and like a good manager, he was able to accomplish this, and the labor-intensive task of going up and checking every one of the bolts to see if it was properly glued into the concrete was being done. n nAnd then there was the morning that the Boston Herald had the headline "Say it isn't so, Mitt" — the "independent" inspection was being conducted by the same company that had caused the problem in the first place — he had unknowingly hired them again to do this. n nThe best of managers make mistakes, and Romney immediately fixed this by firing Bectel and hiring different engineers. And no one at the top is ever going to possibly know everything about anything he is responsible for — Jimmy Carter is what happens when someone tries to. n nWhat bothers me is that no one in the lower levels of the Romney administration — the kid just out of college, the janitor who heard something from someone else, the secretary in a completely different part of the executive branch who heard about it at a family gathering — none of the low level people felt safe enough to go "upstairs" and say "guys, I think we might have a problem." n nThe Romney administration was a very much top-down "keep your mouth shut and don't dare disagree" operation — not unlike that of GW Bush and we know how well that went. Not unlike the military approach of US Grant and historians tell us how well that went as well. This works in private sector management and the military but in government at the executive level you must balance top-down authority with populism. In business, the person disagreeing with you 10% of the time gets fired, in government, that is the person who is supporting you 90% of the time and you have to tolerate the rest lest you become very insular and out of touch. n nIt is how you don't know whom you have hired for the most visible of inspection jobs. n nIt is how his predecessor, Jane Swift, appointed a dead guy to a commission on disability rights — and had she the humility to share the list of names with the lower levels of her supporters, like the local college republican chapters, the person who did the paperwork vacating him out of his apartment upon his death, a month earlier (me) would have sent off an email to the effect of "if this is the same person I think it is, he is dead." n nThis is the question Romney really needs to answer — not is he a good manager but is he TOO good a "manager" and not good enough a leader. As George Will asked, is he essentially another Michael Dukakas — a good technocrat manager.