Now that We Joined Alice in Falling Down the Political Rabbit Hole — Willing Self-Delusion Seems to Be Guiding American Behavior — and a Comment about How President Obama’s Competitiveness Gets the Best of Him and Undercuts the Probability of Achieving a Successful American Future

04 September 2012

Unattractive personal foibles in our leaders says something depressing about the rest of us

Six recently published media articles cumulatively highlight the self-destructive insanity that characterizes American direction.

The essays are based on this country’s infatuation with:

(a) lying and liars

and

(b) making an easy buck at someone else’s expense.

Citations — to the six articles

Sean Carman, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, Huffington Post (01 September 2012)

Matt Taibbi, Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital, Rolling Stone (29 August 2012)

Jodi Kantor, The Competitor in Chief: Obama Plays to Win, in Politics and Everything Else, New York Times (02 September 2012)

John F. Harris and Jonathan Martin, DNC 2012: Barack Obama, the conventional president, Politico (03 September 2012)

Mike Shedlock, The Middle Class Are Blaming The Wrong People For Their Three Lost Decades, Business Insider (03 September 2012)

Chris Hedges, Life Is Sacred, Truthdig (03 September 2012)

Beginning small — in politics, why lie about a marathon time?

Vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan’s magnum lie about running a marathon in the “high twos,” when it actually took him over 4 hours would appear to be indicative of the man.

Sean Carman summed the larger point up nicely:

During a radio interview last week with political blogger Hugh Hewitt, Paul Ryan claimed to have once run a marathon in under three hours.

Ryan said, "Under three, high twos. I had a two-hour and fifty something."

But, as Runner's World reported yesterday, Ryan apparently ran only one marathon in his life, when he was 20, and his time was 4 hours, 1 minute, and 25 seconds.

As . . . Paul Krugman points out, on its own, Ryan's fib wouldn't matter. But Ryan has been lying for years about his budget proposals.

His casual lie about his marathon time fits a pattern, and seems to reveal something characteristic about him, namely that he lies to advance his own interests . . . .

And so here is the takeaway from last week's saturation-level political activity, revealed not by the carefully-staged theater we witnessed, but by the moments in which the actors went off-script and the truth was accidentally revealed . . . .

Character-wise, presidential nominee Mitt Romney is not much better.

Getting bigger, distorting the past — Governor Romney’s Bain Capital private equity history says a lot about his predatory personal ethics

I am not one to criticize Governor Romney’s professional performance at Bain Capital. He appears to have played that bit of capitalism’s “feed off the other man’s labor” with genuine talent.

So, given that what Bain did under Governor Romney was legal, what can one rationally criticize?

One can express discomfort with aspects of the private equity game and with the eagerness with which Governor Romney played them.

Here, Buddhism has something conceptually useful to contribute. How one makes a living is a spiritual question. It is impossible to be spiritually skillful and professionally harm-dealing at the same time.

That is where I do have an issue with Governor Romney and, indeed, with most Wall Street types.

Matt Taibbi, entertainingly foam-mouthed liberal writer of talent and insight, recently wrote:

A private equity firm like Bain typically seeks out floundering businesses with good cash flows. It then puts down a relatively small amount of its own money and runs to a big bank like Goldman Sachs or Citigroup for the rest of the financing.

The takeover firm then uses that borrowed money to buy a controlling stake in the target company, either with or without its consent.

Romney and Bain avoided the hostile approach, preferring to secure the cooperation of their takeover targets by buying off a company's management with lucrative bonuses.

But here's the catch. When Bain borrows all of that money from the bank, it's the target company that ends up on the hook for all of the debt.

So in addition to whatever problems you had before, [hypothetical] Tricycle Inc. now owes Goldman or Citigroup $350 million.

With all that new debt service to pay, the company's bottom line is suddenly untenable: You almost have to start firing people immediately just to get your costs down to a manageable level.

And that, says Taibbi (accurately) is when the target company has to start firing workers and selling off its assets.

But it gets even better for the Bain Capital side of this perversion of workable social ethics:

Fortunately, the geniuses at Bain who now run the place are there to help tell you whom to fire.

And for the service it performs cutting your company's costs to help you pay off the massive debt that it, Bain, saddled your company with in the first place, Bain naturally charges a management fee, typically millions of dollars a year.

So Tricycle Inc. now has two gigantic new burdens it never had before Bain Capital stepped into the picture: tens of millions in annual debt service, and millions more in "management fees."

Since the initial acquisition of Tricycle Inc. was probably greased by promising the company's upper management lucrative bonuses, all that pain inevitably comes out of just one place: the benefits and payroll of the hourly workforce.

The spreading blot — hubris and self-deception from Democrats, as well

Representative Ryan and Governor Romney are not alone in displaying spiritually unattractive personal foibles that ultimately cost other people well-being.

The New York Times (finally) picked up on what I had noticed about President Obama, shortly after he took office. The man overestimates his ability, while shrouded in conceit’s fog. These qualities do not make for reliably effective team leaders.

Most of us know conceited people like this. Not one of them is simultaneously competent, trustworthy, and capable of leading the group for the good of the whole.

That President Obama’s first term proved to be less than admirable is not surprising. It is difficult to achieve something on the nation’s behalf, when one’s focus is personal.

Jodi Kantor wrote:

Even by the standards of the political world, Mr. Obama’s obsession with virtuosity and proving himself the best are remarkable, those close to him say. (Critics call it arrogance.)

But even those loyal to Mr. Obama say that his quest for excellence can bleed into cockiness and that he tends to overestimate his capabilities. The cloistered nature of the White House amplifies those tendencies . . . .

And though Mr. Obama craves high grades from the electorate and from history, he is in a virtual dead heat with Mr. Romney in national polls, the political equivalent of school progress reports.

For someone dealing with the world’s weightiest matters, Mr. Obama spends surprising energy perfecting even less consequential pursuits.

He has played golf 104 times since becoming president, according to Mark Knoller of CBS News, who monitors his outings, and he asks superior players for tips that have helped lower his scores. He decompresses with card games on Air Force One, but players who do not concentrate risk a reprimand . . . .

“I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters,” Mr. Obama told Patrick Gaspard, his political director, at the start of the 2008 campaign, according to The New Yorker.

“I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m going to think I’m a better political director than my political director.”

Looking below the surface of these usually irritating character traits, one sees a darker picture.

President Obama’s statement about being better than key members of his team demonstrates:

(i) an underlying discomfort with actually recruiting people of exceptional ability

and

(ii) a mistaken sense of what his mission as President should have been.

When game-playing becomes the goal, Reality-irrelevant boundaries define the mission — and Truth and Nation lose

Competitive people have to keep score. Conceited competitive people have to get immediate gratification.

These character traits present the President with leadership pitfalls that I doubt he sees.

A gifted leader looks to Reality’s problems, so as to define her mission. President Obama, in contrast, appears to look to the rules of artificially conceived games to define the “points” that he wants to win.

For example, if political success is “The Game” — rather than implementing the nation’s actual interests — then getting out of Afghanistan is something that can be indefinitely deferred, no matter how many troops are unnecessarily killed and maimed.

If tallying a superior vote total in 2012 is the key to achieving the President’s sense of personal worth, then lying and cynical political pragmatism are instruments to that success. Truth-telling and national mission-defining, both of which are a hard sell with pain-avoiding voters, are things to be avoided.

No matter how much the President wishes to measured well by History, his too-narrowly focused competitive outlook scores itself over significantly too short a time period — to have a significant chance of coming out notably well in historians’ eyes decades from today.

In consequence of his short-sighted and apparently shallowly competitive nature, President Obama’s first term has been nothing special.

Nothing out of the ordinary — John F. Harris and Jonathan Martin assess the President’s conventional presidency

Given the change that 2008 presidential candidate (then Senator) Barack Obama promised voters, his first term has been a disappointment:

He is a man of conventional instincts, practicing conventional politics, sitting atop what has been a mostly conventional presidency.

The political operative ethos of this West Wing is seen in how reflexively Obama reacts to outside pressure, such as whether to dump a troublesome appointee overboard.

The reality is that Obama by his own admission has not used his pulpit in creative ways — failing to “tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism,” as he told a CBS News interviewer this summer.

And, far from breaking a generation-long partisan standoff in Washington, Obama’s presidency has been almost entirely defined by it.

Many people believe that Obama had a chance to break the chains of conventional partisan combat during his first term. The opportunity was when the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles deficit commission, a group that Obama had willed into creation, came back with a package of spending cuts, including on popular entitlement programs, and revenue increases, mainly through reforming the Tax Code.

Obama, deferring to deep skepticism in his own party and opposition among congressional Republicans, brushed this proposal aside. Particularly for centrists, Simpson-Bowles became a sort of shorthand representing what could have been.

“That was an inflection point because it became clearly evident at that moment that they were in campaign mode,” said Dave McCurdy, a former Oklahoma Democratic congressman . . . .

“He no longer cared about policy; the reelection was more important than policy. It was probably the last opportunity to present another bipartisan approach. It made the president appear smaller.”

Shoveling Bowles-Simpson into a dark alley marked the point at which I accepted that Barack Obama was more interested in himself than the nation’s future.

The President is, for all his genuinely admirable talents, an irritatingly risk-averse, small-ball competitor. Not exactly someone whom seasoned troops will follow through flaming doorways.

“So, Pete, whose fault is all this?”

Regarding blame, I agree with “Mish” Shedlock, writing in Business Insider.

He looked at a recent Pew Research Center opinion poll, which asked middle class respondents whom they blamed for their woes:

Note that 62% blame politicians and 54% blame financial institutions, but only 8% blame themselves.

Five Questions

1. Did banks force people to take out loans they could not pay back, or did people do so voluntarily?

2. Who elects congress?

3. Do people make enough effort to understand interest rates, debt, the economic policies of politicians, exponential math and its implications, the untenable nature of public union pension plans and promises?

4. Do a significant number of people (if not the majority) get their economic views (assuming they have any economic views) from The View, Oprah, The Talk, or CNBC?

5. Why did PEW leave off the Fed and Fractional Reserve Lending from the list of answers?

Two Bonus Questions

1. Would the majority of respondents know anything at all about the Fed and Fractional Reserve lending had the PEW listed those options?

2. Who is really to blame for what is happening?

Chris Hedges’ eloquent summation of America’s fundamental plight — lazy delusion

Journalist Chris Hedges concluded that:

The giddy, money-drenched, choreographed carnival in Tampa and the one coming up in Charlotte divert us from the real world—the one steadily collapsing around us.

The glitz and propaganda, the ridiculous obsessions imparted by our electronic hallucinations, and the spectacles that pass for political participation mask the deadly ecological assault by the corporate state.

The worse it gets, the more we retreat into self-delusion.

We convince ourselves that global warming does not exist. Or we concede that it exists but insist that we can adapt. Both responses satisfy our mania for eternal optimism and our reckless pursuit of personal comfort.

In America, when reality is distasteful we ignore it.

The moral? — Our enemy is ourselves

What a surprise.

PeteFree.com

Now that We Joined Alice in Falling Down the Political Rabbit Hole — Willing Self-Delusion Seems to Be Guiding American Behavior — and a Comment about How President Obama’s Competitiveness Gets the Best of Him and Undercuts the Probability of Achieving a Successful American Future