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COMMENTARY
February 4, 2009
Leadership
There's an e-mail that has landed in my inbox a lot, lately: a thrilling rant on the current state of everything, purporting to be by Lee Iacocca -- the former CEO of two of Detroit's Big Three car makers. It is the sort of thing that one must decline to forward oneself, until one has checked with Snopes.com (the one-stop shop for e-mail forwards that don't smell quite right).Check. These are in fact Mr. Iacocca's words: "Am I the only guy in this country who's fed up with what's happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We've got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we've got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can't even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, 'Stay the course.' "Stay the course? You've got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I'll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out!" And so on. I thought it might be Iacocca when I saw the mixed metaphor: ships of state should go into the cliff, not over it. Plus that wonderful blow-off, like the sperm whale, taking its sight of the whaleship, Pequod. But of course there was something fishy in the e-mails. For the Captain Ahab in Mr. Iacocca's sight was George W. Bush, and the screed was written (or co-written) for his 2007 book, Where Have All the Leaders Gone? -- the one that now famously offers the "nine Cs" for leadership, "Common Sense, Communication, Creativity," etc. Instead, Iacocca's rant is now being distributed as a way to bash Barack Obama, the new man on the bridge. Quite reasonably, to my mind. For as we are beginning to see, President Obama has the same fixed political instincts as his predecessor for solving America's domestic problems, both short and long term: throw money at them, throw more money, and then throw more money after that. President Bush was perhaps more blameworthy, because as a conservative, he should have known better. He should have known, and partly did know, that bailouts have a long history of not working, except arguably in carefully delimited circumstances where the candidate for rescue is genuinely blameless. In all other circumstances they compound the structural problems they address, by rewarding failure; by making the people who behaved responsibly pay for the mistakes of the people who behaved irresponsibly. Bailouts, which include "stimulus packages" that direct income to people who have not earned it, are, alas, integral to the cumbersome machinery by which the Nanny State spreads moral jeopardy. They subvert the moral and economic order, simultaneously, as Jerry Taylor of the Cato Institute explained with wonderful concision recently: "Capitalism without the threat of bankruptcy is like Christianity without the threat of hell. It doesn't work very well." And this is before mentioning the monstrous, compounding debt that is bequeathed to our children. President Obama can be more easily forgiven than Bush, to the extent that he is indeed a glittering fog of pretty words, with no idea what he is doing. His suggestion during the campaign that his financial strategy would consist of calling in the experts and asking them what he should do, gave the game away. He is following the prevailing political wisdom, and the instincts of his party, out the window. I shudder at the disaster that is coming, and on behalf of those who will be blamed for it when the public look for scapegoats. We already have a taste of that. Our own prime minister, Stephen Harper, is I think the most blameworthy of any politician within our horizon, for his own supposedly Damascene conversion to wild deficit spending. For Mr. Harper is not a stupid man, nor a poorly informed one. He unquestionably knows that what he is doing is ruinously counter-productive, as one may see by looking at his own past statements, from his University of Calgary master's thesis, forward. The condescending media consensus is, Mr. Harper has learned the hard way that governing a country means abandoning your "ideological certainties." That's a nice way of saying, he publicly denies what he believes to be true, for the sake of clinging to power. Mr. Iacocca's rant was against failures of leadership. He had the tone right, but neither in the passage I quoted, nor anywhere else I have found for looking, does he come to the one crucial point, beyond rant. It is that a leader must be a lonely man. He must defend the truth, alone if necessary. He must win his people over to the truth, by every honest means at his disposal, or go down trying. It is when we don't have leaders like that, that we have messes like this. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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