A Responsibility-Avoiding Leader Is a Bad One — President Obama Is a Good Example of What Happens When Character and Professional Role Do Not Match

© 2013 Peter Free

 

15 May 2013

 

 

Some leadership positions are so important that it is hard to be kind, when an incompetent fills them

 

For the last few years, I have been increasingly critical of President Obama’s conniving willingness to abandon integrity in favor of personal political self-help.  However, I have been careful not to confuse my dislike for his presidential performance with him as a person.

 

My caution in that regard is now changing.  I am beginning to recognize that the Commander in Chief’s lacking moral center account for many, perhaps all, of his directionless ambling.

 

He is apparently not temperamentally suited to the demands of the presidency.  It seems that overweening ego led this otherwise highly intelligent man to seek a role that cries out, in these times, for a leader with more than finely honed genius for political social climbing.

 

 

The formal indictment comes from the always insightful Dana Milbank

 

The Washington Post columnist wrote yesterday:

 

 

President Passerby needs urgently to become a participant in his presidency.

 

Late Monday came the breathtaking news of a full-frontal assault on the First Amendment by his administration: word that the Justice Department had gone on a fishing expedition through months of phone records of Associated Press reporters.

 

And yet President Obama reacted much as he did to the equally astonishing revelation on Friday that the IRS had targeted conservative groups based on their ideology: He responded as though he were just some bloke on a bar stool, getting his information from the evening news.

 

In the phone-snooping case, Obama didn’t even stir from his stool. Instead, he had his press secretary, former Time magazine journalist Jay Carney, go before an incensed press corps Tuesday afternoon and explain why the president will not be involving himself in his Justice Department’s trampling of press freedoms.

 

“Other than press reports, we have no knowledge of any attempt by the Justice Department to seek phone records of the Associated Press,” Carney announced.

 

The president “found out about the news reports yesterday on the road,” he added.

 

And now that Obama has learned about this extraordinary abuse of power, he’s not doing a thing about it.

 

“We are not involved at the White House in any decisions made in connection with ongoing criminal investigations,” Carney argued.

 

© 2013 Dana Milbank, Obama, the uninterested president, Washington Post (14 May 2013) (last paragraph split)

 

 

An analogy explains the situation

 

Would you respect a naval captain, who lets his crew do whatever they want, when his ship is in mortal seas?

 

Would you respect a ship captain, who is so divorced from the ethos of leadership, that he would risk his vessel by effectively abandoning its helm in the worst of seas?

 

 

The moral? — Dispassion marks the President — instead, he would be better served by a passionate sense of national mission

 

President Obama has come to caricaturize people, who seek leadership for reasons of ego, rather than service to a cause greater than self.  Hence, the discombobulated appearance of his crew run wild.

 

The captain sets the ship’s course and tone.  Running from those responsibilities does not alter their truth.