Rant 10-18-12

Proof, as if proof was needed, as to why being a CEO is not good training to be president of the United States.

The Professor is feeling dragged down and under the weather but nonetheless feels the need to jabber into the void. Or perhaps the ill health is prompting this attempt. Well no matter.

In the recent presidential debate – actually not a debate as a bastardized town hall where the public (Horrors) provided the questions. The professor is of the opinion that if we are going to have debates between candidates they should either be in this format or return control of the format of the debates to the league of women voters (of course neither of these outcomes are very likely and after the last debate the prospect of another town hall is rather unlikely as well)

I digress.

The defining moment of the evening came when Romney – continuing his pursuit of Obama over the incident Libya – Per the Romneybot it too Obama 12-14 days to get around to calling the attack on our consulate in Libya a terrorist act. This neatly avoided the fact that on tape the President said the very next day “no act of terror” and went on to promise that the perpetrators would be brought to justice (or shot in the head by Seal team six) – when the moderator at the debate pointed this out Romney had this the fuck? Look on his face as if Obama had just hit him in the face with fish. A large salmon to be more precise.

It was such a damaging moment that the right wing noise machine has gone into hysterical over drive trying to muddy the waters and accusing the moderator who will never be invited to any of those parties again and is also parsing the president’s comments to so they somehow mean what they want them to mean.

Which brings us to the point of this – Romney should never in a million fucking years have gone near this point. It was a loser back when he held a press conference to try and score points off of 4 Americas getting killed and it’s still a loser now. He got reamed for it then and he’s getting reamed for it now.

And why? Because he’s a CEO – first off the whole maneuver by Romney was a fairly typical dick move by a CEO looking to take an underling down a peg or two.  A CEO is an absolute monarch in the business system these days. And Romney is the kind who makes jokes and the rest of the staff laugh nervously.

CEO’s are not people who are told “that won’t work.”   They live a cocoon of warm fuzzies told to them by their underlings. We are fairly certain that Romney completely believed that Obama had not said the magic word terror until 12 days later and nobody inside the cocoon who wanted to keep their job was going to say otherwise. The problems is the nature of the CEO position, in it the very qualities celebrated in American business – the Alpha Male, the My way or the highway and leadership defined as being a dick are not qualities that lend themselves to the rather difficult job of being President of the United States. Even if the President is blessed with majorities in both houses and a friendly supreme court there are ever so many people who are going to tell him to go fuck himself when he wants something done now.  The CEO of Goldman Sachs could announce that everybody who works at Goldman must wear purple on Tuesday and there would be a mad rush to the stores to find something purple to wear.

It is not a mindset that allows itself to listen to bad news or even news – business is such a constrained and artificial universe that being a total jerk isn’t that much of a handicap and at times can be a boon. But the world outside is a lot messier and harder to deal with then by just yelling at an underling.

I should know.