Effective Leadership Is Based on Paying Attention — So, I Have to Laugh when Liberals Say that President Bush’s Katrina Failure Was Much Worse than President Obama’s Jaw-Dropping Incompetence in regard to the ObamaCare Rollout — a Sublimely Apt Lesson for Future Strategists

© 2013 Peter Free

 

19 November 2013

 

 

Do not casually lead all your troops into a position from which they are unlikely to survive

 

Yet, President Obama’s process-aloof conceit did exactly that with the Affordable Care Act’s implementation.

 

 

First — let’s look at the implications of the ObamaCare implosion, as it stands today

 

After:

 

(i) cobbling together a health care law that is so complicated that no one can honestly estimate how it is going to play out

 

(ii) forcing people to buy into the plan, so that private insurers can skim their customary excessive profits

 

and

 

(iii) lying about the continuity of some people’s existing plans —

 

the President stood idly by while:

 

(iv) incompetent government supervisors and multiple private contractors bungled the technological aspects of the signup process

 

which

 

(v) undermined the actuarial risk pool that is essential to making ObamaCare work

 

and

 

 (vi) led to a flurry of Democratic Party feet headed for exits by calling for legalizing the very policies that ObamaCare had been designed to eliminate

 

ultimately resulting in:

 

(vii) casting an increased stench over what was supposed to have been the President’s one signature achievement

 

and

 

(viii) reducing the likelihood that a possibly future-kludged ObamaCare will actually work as hoped

 

and

 

(ix) near guaranteeing that the 2014 mid-term elections are going to turn what should have been some slight Congressional gains into an almost certain further erosion of Democratic Party strength — all of this happening immediately after Republican Tea Party firebrands had handed the President a gift in the form of their publicly perceived idiocy.

 

In short, the Commander in Chief led his troops into an indefensible position from previously favorable terrain.

 

 

Second — contrast President George W. Bush’s lesser failure with Hurricane Katrina

 

Democrats are today saying that President Bush’s failure in coping with Katrina cost lives and that, of course, is much worse than President Obama’s failure with the Affordable Care Act.  To strengthen the Democratic argument, I would add that President Bush’s incompetence efficiently illustrated the Republican Party’s distaste for government, poor people, and black people.

 

But Katrina did not fundamentally sabotage the Bush Administration’s reason for existing.  Katrina was not a core element of the philosophy that Bush brought to and evolved in office — miserable though that might have been.

 

In other words, George W. Bush was not dumb enough to bring his Administration’s “house” down around his ears with one magnificently blundered symbolic escapade.  President Obama, thanks to his apparently bottomless well of complacent arrogance, was.

 

If the Bush Administration is seen as a failure in some quarters, it will be the result of death by a thousand cuts.  If the Obama Administration is perceived as a loser, it will be the result of just one immense, character-revealing failure regarding strategy and implementation.

 

 

Prognosis — uncertain

 

We do not yet know how the Affordable Car Act turmoil is going to settle.  But given that it has left millions of people irritated, and therefore unlikely to support ObamaCare or Democrats, the President’s jaw-dropping inaction and lack of foresight in this matter has changed the course of previously probable history.

 

 

The moral? — Being “smart” does not guard us against our own incompetence

 

Arrogance aggravates the tendency to coast.

 

An effective leader does not need to micromanage.  But he and she do need to (a) actively investigate what is going on and (b) conscientiously direct and hold accountable the chain of command that is assigned to execute the mission.  The more important the mission, the more attentive the leader has to be.

 

Simple stuff.  But hard to live.