The Bad CEO
May. 9th, 2004 09:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
libertangoKevin Drum has a post that takes Dubya at his word back when he assumed power -- that Dubya wanted to be "the CEO President".
Back when the recession (and my joblessness) seemed interminable, one of my lines was, "These guys said they'd run the country like a business. Trouble is, nobody paid attention to how bad they were at running businesses."
Anyway, Mark Schmitt takes the image and runs. Choice excerpts:
"Kevin strengthens my instinct that this is exactly the right way to understand the Bush presidency. Rather than trying to understand Bush in terms of his father, Nixon, Reagan, Harding, Taft, Grant, or some other presidential model, the books to read are the accounts of the failures of great American companies at the hands of incompetent leaders, like David Halberstam's The Reckoning or the books about the savings and loan crisis or the failure of IBM. And keeping the Bad CEO imagine in mind will be the way to defeat Bush. It's a familiar archetype to Americans, and it's exactly right. It helps you understand that he's not so much a born liar as a guy in so far over his head that he starts making things up to keep the stock price high. And he's not a moron, just a guy who would have made a perfectly competent regional vice president, but somehow had the right patrons and played golf at the right clubs, and wound up in the big office on the 35th floor instead."
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"Understanding Bush as "the bad CEO" will have a positive effect on Democrats' language. Take, for example, a pet peeve of mine: The use of the phrase "failure of diplomacy" to describe Bush's pre- and post-war behavior, the phrase Daschle used. I think "failure of diplomacy" concedes far too much. The good CEO might be guilty of failures of diplomacy, of having a vision for change and pushing hard. The strong leader breaks some china, as they say. Diplomacy is namby-pamby and superficial. But if you think of Bush as the Bad CEO, you don't hesitate to call it what it is: a failure of leadership. Leaders persuade others, and leaders also absorb information and other points of view. They change direction in order to find the smoothest path to their goals. They react quickly to changes, to get ahead of them."
Back when the recession (and my joblessness) seemed interminable, one of my lines was, "These guys said they'd run the country like a business. Trouble is, nobody paid attention to how bad they were at running businesses."
Anyway, Mark Schmitt takes the image and runs. Choice excerpts:
"Kevin strengthens my instinct that this is exactly the right way to understand the Bush presidency. Rather than trying to understand Bush in terms of his father, Nixon, Reagan, Harding, Taft, Grant, or some other presidential model, the books to read are the accounts of the failures of great American companies at the hands of incompetent leaders, like David Halberstam's The Reckoning or the books about the savings and loan crisis or the failure of IBM. And keeping the Bad CEO imagine in mind will be the way to defeat Bush. It's a familiar archetype to Americans, and it's exactly right. It helps you understand that he's not so much a born liar as a guy in so far over his head that he starts making things up to keep the stock price high. And he's not a moron, just a guy who would have made a perfectly competent regional vice president, but somehow had the right patrons and played golf at the right clubs, and wound up in the big office on the 35th floor instead."
*^*^*
"Understanding Bush as "the bad CEO" will have a positive effect on Democrats' language. Take, for example, a pet peeve of mine: The use of the phrase "failure of diplomacy" to describe Bush's pre- and post-war behavior, the phrase Daschle used. I think "failure of diplomacy" concedes far too much. The good CEO might be guilty of failures of diplomacy, of having a vision for change and pushing hard. The strong leader breaks some china, as they say. Diplomacy is namby-pamby and superficial. But if you think of Bush as the Bad CEO, you don't hesitate to call it what it is: a failure of leadership. Leaders persuade others, and leaders also absorb information and other points of view. They change direction in order to find the smoothest path to their goals. They react quickly to changes, to get ahead of them."
