Beneath noise lies fundamental truth

Change is extremely difficult and damn near impossible without new systems, behaviors and people.

That's the takeaway on today's mid-term election. While the pundits and strategists argue ad nausea about who is going to win what, it would help to take a step back and understand this situation from a leadership perspective.

With all due respect to a good friend, what President Obama and the Democratic party's congressional majority face is not a communications issue. Or at least not fundamentally. More to the point it's a failure to answer the will of the people. The Great Recession has produced the most economic destruction since the Great Depression. Yet what was the first major initiative of the new administration and Congress? Stimulus in the form of government money, which as many Joe Q. citizens know, comes with at least a 5:1 ratio of cost vs. return. Translated dollar for dollar that means that for every dollar given back through the taxpayer it costs five more for the government to deliver basic product or service. The defensive argument that doing so helped save jobs that otherwise would have been lost just doesn't pan out in a capitalistic economic system. Never has, never will. The opposition's argument that stimulus has created crippling debt burdens isn't intellectually honest either. But that's another story and one best left to Paul Krugman at the New York Times.

Against this backdrop of both opinion and fact, we have had to witness the bailouts of banks, insurance and car companies too big to fail, which again while stemming red ink, galvanized public opinion. When people are losing their jobs and homes and they see big business being rewarded despite abject failure, isn't it normal to expect someone to deliver something back to them? To borrow a favorite phrase from another unpopular former president, that's just common sensical. Then came health care reform, which arguably is the most consequential piece of legislation since the Civil Rights Act. Yet most of what's contained in the new law either doesn't kick in right away, or worse yet, is unexplainable at a pedestrian level.

Here is what the current narrative boils down to. Our political leaders are failing us, but it's not entirely their fault (although they deserve the blame.) The system is broken. It's divided, dysfunctional, too big to fail and riddled with special interest, which only seems to grow during a time when it needs to be stomped out at the largest levels. Until someone with leadership chops and the will of the people can improve those two areas, nothing is going to change. The how is always dramatically more difficult than the what, where and when.

President Obama has all the personal leadership capability in the world, but until he finds a way to address and work like Hell to fix the system, his tenure will be marred by What Ifs. To suggest, just as his predecessor did, that it's impossible to manage a successful modern day presidency goes beyond the pale of passing the buck.

From a personal POV, it's been disappointing to watch how President Obama interpreted the original leadership mandate. See an earlier post from back in late 2007: http://povblogger.blogspot.com/2008/11/sailing-against-headwinds.html Such hope and promise only to be dashed by more of the same. What we have now is not Change We Can Believe in. It's more Change that Hasn't Happened yet. Or as John Stewart so appropriately asked in last week's interview: Are we still the people that we're waiting for? Too funny (For text enthusiasts, LOL or its lower case version, lol, which means not as funny.)

Here's hoping that the ship's course can be righted and the private sector economy continues to improve. To re-brand another old phrase: It's the Economy, Smarty!

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