Why Experience Matters

[elleng]

Source: NY Times

"Hayward argues that the nation’s founders wanted uncertified citizens to hold the highest offices in the land. They did not believe in a separate class of professional executives. They wanted rough and rooted people like Palin.

I would have more sympathy for this view if I hadn’t just lived through the last eight years. For if the Bush administration was anything, it was the anti-establishment attitude put into executive practice.

And the problem with this attitude is that, especially in his first term, it made Bush inept at governance. It turns out that governance, the creation and execution of policy, is hard. It requires acquired skills. Most of all, it requires prudence.

What is prudence? It is the ability to grasp the unique pattern of a specific situation. It is the ability to absorb the vast flow of information and still discern the essential current of events — the things that go together and the things that will never go together. It is the ability to engage in complex deliberations and feel which arguments have the most weight.

How is prudence acquired? Through experience. The prudent leader possesses a repertoire of events, through personal involvement or the study of history, and can apply those models to current circumstances to judge what is important and what is not, who can be persuaded and who can’t, what has worked and what hasn’t. " >>>



Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/16/opinion/16brooks.html?ref=opinion

[NC_Nurse]

1. Why David Brooks gets it right?

Bless his heart. }(

[elleng]

2. He does that,

occasionally!

[Demeter]

3. The US Has a Farm System for Leadership

And whether one traverses the Political path, or the Business path, the Losers are supposed to be dropped out early in a form of social Darwinism.

Bush was never eliminated, because his Daddy protected him.

Sarah Palin was never eliminated because the entire GOP, her church, and her thug of a husband protected her. Alaska was too corrupt and too fragmented to resist the thugs. And too ignorant and proud of it, frankly, a common failing of those who vote for GOP candidates.

That GOP protection racket cannot survive the economic conflagration that will, if there's any justice, strip the Bush family of its weapons (dollars) in the war on America, and see that Palin ends up behind bars or wearing a tether in the very near future.