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Bay of Pigs

Inexperience IV

by Bill O'Connell on July 29, 2009

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Just what is a czar anyway?  And I am not talking about the Russian royal family.  A czar is essentially a presidential advisor.  Take a moment to think about that.  Why does President Obama need to appoint 32, give or take, czars in his administration?  Could it be that he really, really needs a lot of advising?

In the campaign, the main stream media, somehow diverted the attention away from Obama’s glaring lack of experience as the Presidential candidate and put all their focus on Sarah Palin’s “lack of experience.”  Sarah Palin had more executive experience as a sitting governor and I emphasize executive experience, than Obama, Biden, and McCain combined.

But the media tut-tutted, and said “it’s only Alaska,” as for her mayoral experience, “it was a very small town.”  When Obama slipped his teleprompter and tried to claim he was running a very large organization, his campaign, it was laughable.  But don’t worry, he had Joe Biden to lean on.  I feel better.

Presidents and The Experience They Brought With Them

Let’s take a look back at past elected presidents and the executive experience they brought to office:

  • George W. Bush — Governor of  Texas
  • Bill Clinton — Governor of Arkansas
  • George H. W. Bush — Vice President of the United States, Head of the CIA
  • Ronald Reagan — Governor of California
  • Jimmy Carter — Governor of Georgia
  • Richard Nixon — Vice President of the United States
  • Lyndon Johnson — Vice President of the United States
  • John F. Kennedy — None.  He was a legislator and his inexperience nearly got us annihilated with the Cuban Missile Crisis, following the Bay of Pigs, and an embarrassing showdown with Khrushchev
  • Dwight D. Eisenhower — Five star general in command of all Allied Forces in Europe in World War II
  • Harry Truman — Vice President of the United States
  • Franklin D. Roosevelt — Governor of New York , Secretary of the Navy
  • Herbert Hoover — Secretary of Commerce
  • Calvin Coolidge — Vice President of the United States, Governor of Massachusetts
  • Warren G. Harding — Lieutenant Governor of Ohio
  • Woodrow Wilson — Governor of New Jersey, President of Princeton University
  • William Howard Taft –  Secretary of War
  • Theodore Roosevelt — Vice President of the United States, Governor of New York, Assistant Secretary of the Navy

Legislators Versus Executives

So, from the beginning of the 20th Century until the election of Barack Obama, only once has a  president with only legislative experience been elected, John F. Kennedy.  Nikita Khrushchev took advantage of Kennedy’s inexperience in their first summit in Vienna, and then there was the aborted Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and the attempted overthrow of Castro.  On top of those two building blocks we got the Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought us closer than we have ever been to thermonuclear obliteration.

The Eternal Campaign

President Obama is no different.  He has the least experience of any president since 1900.  He effectively was only a United States Senator for two years, as he was busy campaigning for the next two years and resigned his last two years after being elected president.  So what does he do?  He does what he is comfortable doing and what he is good at, campaigning.  He has held more press conferences in six months than his predecessor did in eight years.  Who is running the show while Obama is running around?  Is it Nancy Pelosi?  Rahm Emmanual?  His programs are falling apart.  The stimulus isn’t working and more Americans say that it has hurt the economy rather than helped it (31%-25%) and that the rest of it should be canceled.  His cap and trade plan is opposed by most Americans (56%) who don’t want to pay more in taxes to fight global warming.  His government takeover of our health care is opposed by most Americans (53%-44%) and yet he presses on, figuring that with enough campaigning the American people will be won over.

This may be a long slog, waiting for 2012 and hoping our country does not get destroyed by all the power grabbing characters in Congress, who don’t care a whit about us, only about increasing the powerful control they have over our lives.  We have the fight of our lives on our hands preventing the taking of our liberties.

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Hope and Change, Well, Never Mind

by Bill O'Connell on November 28, 2008

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As Barack Obama builds his Administration team you can sense the frustration starting to build on the left and among those who are still paying attention.  In an article in yesterday’s New York Times, Obama Describes Team as Experienced Yet Fresh, you can anticipate the eloquent gymnastics you are about to read as you would watching the young Chinese girls at the Beijing Olympics.

The Perception of Change

As the agent of hope and change, some people are beginning to wonder that if this is so, why is he populating his administration with so many people from the Clinton administration, causing one pundit to ask if we wanted a return to the Clinton Administration we would have voted for Hillary.  The master politician responded to this line of thinking thusly, “Americans would be ‘rightly troubled’ if he overlooked experience to create the perception of change.’”   Let me see if I have this right.  If you actually change, it is a perception of change, but if you don’t change, it is real change?  I got it.

He went on to elaborate, “What we are going to do is combine experience with fresh thinking.  But understand where the vision for change comes from first and foremost:  It comes from me.”  Okay, let me take a hack at that one.  Barack Obama is bringing together all these people with long resumes in government, with years of experience, and confident in knowing what to do and how to do it, but they are all going to follow Barack Obama’s direction and apply fresh thinking to their settled ways.  Or might they say, yeah kid, go back to the Oval Office and we’ll call you when we need you.

The Voice of Experience

Painting the picture further Obama says, “I suspect that you would be troubled and the American people would be troubled if I selected a Treasury secretary or a chairman of the National Economic Council at one of the most critical economic times in our history who had no experience in government whatsoever.”  But an inexperienced president?  No problem.  Even JFK, who was elected the youngest president in our history, had served one full term in the Senate, was reelected, and was two years into his second term before becoming president.  And he had a pretty rocky time between the Bay of Pigs, his Vienna meeting with Khrushchev, the Cuban Missile Crisis and Viet Nam, in less than three years.  Barack Obama was four years into his first term and half of that time he spent running for president.  Should we not be concerned at the lack of experience at the top?

The Definition of Freshness

To prove his point about the freshness of hope and change, he spoke of Paul Volker.  Now, I think very highly of Paul Volker.  I believe it was he who got inflation under control after the disasterous Carter Administration economic policies.  Obama appointed Volker to lead his economic advisory board.  At 81 years old, he is the epitome of freshness.  How is that you wonder?  Obama masterfully spins it this way, “Paul Volker hasn’t been in Washington for quite some time and that’s part of the reason he can provide a fresh perspective.”  So where does that leave Obama?  Is he stale because he has been in Washington or his he fresh because he has been out campaigning for the last two years?

To cap it off in a question and answer period Obama said, according to the Times, “his [Obama's] call for new ways of thinking on the economy should not be interpreted as a reflection of frustration and disappointment with the Bush administration’s recent economic-recovery efforts.  He signaled his support for the latest $800 billion government bailout plan, which is intended to provide new lending for consumers as well as push down home mortgage rates.”

Anyone Out There Feeling Buyer’s Remorse?

So the purveyor of hope and change wants us all to believe that bringing back the Clinton administration is change; that 81 year old Paul Volker is fresh, but 72 year old John McCain is ancient; that Bush is the cause of all that is wrong with America, but fresh thinking should not be interpreted as frustration with Bush.

My sense has been that Barack Obama was painting himself into a corner.  All the while he believed that with his adroit political and verbal skills he would be able to slip out of the corner unnoticed.

The Democrats have only held the White House for eight of the last twenty-eight years.  So realistically, where else would Obama go for experienced executives?  With no executive experience himself, it’s not like he can bring colleagues in from his past executive positions, like Carter from Georgia, Reagan from California, Clinton from Arkansas, and Bush from Texas.  With only four years in Washington, two of them spent on the road campaigning for president, it’s not like he built a network of experienced executive branch contacts there either.

He is also in the precarious position of having built up expectations so high, there is really no where for his job approval ratings to go, once he takes office, but down.  In addition to all this, he has to watch his left flank.  There are a lot of grumbling noises coming from that direction from a bunch of people with balled up IOUs in their fists, thinking we got you here, where’s the payback?

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You’re gonna do WHAT?

by Bill O'Connell on October 14, 2008

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I read the article with great concern and disbelief, that yes, Christopher Buckley, son of William F. Buckley, Jr., was going over to the Obama camp.  His father was the man who founded National Review at a time when socialism was advancing unchecked.  In the mission statement for the new magazine he wrote, “It stands athwart history, yelling STOP, at a time no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”

The younger Mr. Buckley reiterated that he remains a conservative, so there must be a strongly compelling argument for his decision.  I braced myself to be knocked down by a wave of reason and swept out to sea, only to be fished out of the water by a passing Obama skiff, and hustled off to the voting booth where, I too, would vote for change I could believe in.  What happened next was anticlimactic. 

 Mr. Buckley begins by throwing Sarah Palin over the side, dismissing her as an error in judgment by McCain.  He’s entitled to that opinion, but this election has been chock full of misjudgments by all parties.  What about the top of the ticket?  Buckley goes on to extol the virtues of Senator McCain, and he speaks as someone with first hand knowledge.  However, all of his praises are in the past tense.  He says the campaign has made John McCain “snarly.”  As the final thrust of the argument he quotes McCain as saying, “We came to Washington to change it, and it changed us.”  Et tu, Christo?

Buckley thus made a plausible argument to stay home on Election Day, but I was waiting to learn what pushed the needle all the way to the other side.  The main points of the pro-Obama case were that Obama has a “first class temperament,” that he is intelligent and he writes his own books.  With these attributes, Buckley reasons, he will soon discover that liberalism won’t work; he’ll change his ideas and we will once again live in Camelot, saying that if he doesn’t, “he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.” 

It seems that Mr. Buckley is willing to go “all in” on that bet.  I’m not.  In the 20th century only one President came right out of the Senate, with no executive experience.  That was John F. Kennedy, to whom Barack Obama is often compared.  Shortly after Kennedy took office we had the Bay of Pigs fiasco, a major embarrassment to the Kennedy administration.  Later that year, Kennedy met with Khruschev, without preconditions, by the way.  Does that sound familiar?  Kruschev mopped up the floor with him for two days, prompting Kennedy to say, “He just beat the hell out of me.  I’ve got a terrible problem if he thinks I’m inexperienced and have no guts.  Until we remove those ideas we won’t get anywhere with him.”  Two months later the construction of the Berlin Wall began, and the following year brought the Cuban Missile Crisis, where we came closer to nuclear annihilation than ever; after that began our greater involvement in Viet Nam.  Hope, Change, Charm, Temperament, Intellect, Harvard.  I’ll pass.  If for the first time in nearly fifty years we have no choice but to elect someone from the Senate with no executive experience, I’d rather have someone whose been around the block a couple of times, no matter how surly the old salt is.

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