Voters Are Really Employers

09/30/2006

Paul Munnis

Calls for Rumsfeld’s replacement fall upon deaf ears because of a simple recruiting problem. Few, if any, want to go to work for an Administration that is about to be hog-tied and relegated to two years of handshakes and baby kissing. To make matters worse, the Bush Administration is top down administered and driven from a political and ideological basis rather than factoid based and pragmatically managed. That makes Bush/Chaney the administrative bottlenecks and thus slows the effectiveness of government. Add to that a contention system among top aides plus a Cabinet that is not the real central policy-making group and you see a recipe for failure.

This is why our Foreign Policy is a total failure. This is also the reason why Homeland Security is a mess. Our government is run by a few prima-donnas who cannot possibly manage the totality of our affairs. That is also why there is no replacement for Rummy. Bush is stuck with him for the duration of his term.

There are only two key motives for people to work for the government as managers today and that is to get their hands on the people’s money or to have a platform for advancement of their ideology. Like Jesse James before them they rob places where the money is and like ego-maniacs before them, many behave like prima-donnas.

That leaves us taxpayers having to vet carefully all candidates for elective office. We need to make sure that we are electing people of sound values and good intelligence. Those who we are electing have to oversee the performance of many others and they themselves must not be corrupt. These elected officials are themselves employers and must bring people onto their staff who are both trained and competent.

This is a hard job for voters because the people we are electing are being put into a zone of access where they will be sorely tempted. It is even worse because there is a lot of boredom involved and among high-IQ people that creates temptation. For the elected official new to Washington the job of hiring a staff, setting up effective offices, while at the same time taking on a heavy learning burden and establishing workable office processes are awesome responsibilities.

That in turn puts pressure on leaders to set up processes with checks and balances that keeps their Congressional staff productively employed and working on the key issues of the people from their Districts. The art form of politics then is to map the representation of the needs of the people who they represent to the problems that they can do something about and then manage the processes for effectiveness.

We voters can’t do much about a dysfunctional Executive branch in the short-term except to perform quality oversight. Whoever is the next Executive will have to focus mainly upon a quality management system that by nature delegates work to in-house experts. Macro sized issues are given to the Cabinet, the Cabinet, members strategize and take on delegated parts of the problem, and then they go back and use their Departments and Agencies to implement effective fixes. Solutions come back via bottoms up reporting and measurement systems. That is the opposite of what we are now saddled with using a top down and highly centralized Executive Branch running on a contention based system.

So as long as we have management by ego-maniacs the Executive Branch will be dysfunctional and we will make bad military and political decisions. Our only hope is a Congress that performs sufficient oversight to force the Cabinet members to supervise their people for pragmatic success. We have not had that because the GOP saw no need to police itself. After all they were all in the same Party and all cut from the same cloth of shared ideology. That of course is a false premise and it is why the GOP is now a splintered Party.

We pray that voters will pray attention and choose good people for the job of representing us. Elections are all about choosing top staff for our nation to operate under and we the people need to make sure that we elect people to places of responsibility for the right reasons and that we choose people who have good credentials for the job that they are applying for. In effect you the voters are hiring workers for the U.S. government. If you want high quality results then choose high quality candidates. It’s really not about Party affiliation, it’s about and ability of elected officials to represent their District in a system that is full of seemingly disparate goals. We need people who can shoot the rapids of Washington successfully.