Is our present administration going too fast and taking on too much?

I’ll make a clear statement here: “I’m really tired of hearing the naysayers complaining about President Obama going too fast and ‘biting off more than he can chew’.” In my opinion that is rubbish.

First, I think most of the complaints are from conservative Republican naysayers who want to maintain the status quo of what they created over 12 years prior to 2006 and were able to continue on to 2008 with President Bush’s vetoes. They spent money “hands over fist” on projects and programs that padded their supporter’s pockets with all sorts of lucrative subsidies, favorable contracts, and topped it off with tax breaks for the wealthy. They got to live a conservative Republican’s dream of deregulating about everything they could deregulate which led to all kinds of financial and governmental failure. They got to be “tough guys” with countries elsewhere in the world that didn’t kowtow to their view, even to the point of unilaterally starting an unnecessary war which distracted from a fully justifiable, clear cut military retaliation that itself has now warped into a war with both of them lasting longer than either of the World Wars of the 20th century. And, they would still be following these failed policies if the economy hadn’t done a “humpty-dumpty” off the wall and they couldn’t put him back together again.

Secondly, I think some are opposed to Obama’s drive to fix things, which requires changing things, because they just don’t like to work that hard. Too many are “too old” and “too slow” and they were coasting in their comfort zone. They are elected from “safe” districts and states; they’ve gotten their “pork barrel” bills through Congress to show people back home how much they “love” them; their campaign “war chests” are full or can be easily refilled with a few phone calls because their supporters both owe them and own them; they’ve got their staffs doing all their grunt work; and they are out doing what they do best – getting re-elected over and over. (In all fairness, there are some Democratic Congressmen that are in the same position which is our collective fault.)

Then, along comes this young President who actually wants to take a shot at doing what he said he was going to do in his campaign. This is almost unheard of in their political world. He has turned them upside down and made them very uncomfortable. When they say he is trying to do too much, it really means he is forcing them to have to hustle just to keep up. When you hear Congressmen publicly complaining about how many pages are in a bill, like Universal Health Care, and that they are struggling to get it read that’s a “smoke screen.” Important bills are almost always that long and most Congressmen haven’t been reading them for years. The best hope is that their staffs have been and give them a one or two page summary with a few talking points to use out on the stump. Suddenly they want time to read these bills? They are just “grasping at straws” and stalling.

Thirdly, when you hear them say they want to slow down and consider all the ramifications of a proposal like Universal Health Care, they are stalling again. Where was the slow down and consideration of ramifications for our unilateral rush to war, our deregulation of the financial world in the early 2000’s, or the creation and inadequate funding of prescription drug program? Drafters of legislation do their best to factor in consequences when they write legislation, but no one can second guess the ramifications of some changes until you get into them. You win some and you lose some and conservative Republican’s lost the last election because the ramifications of their policies resulted in failure.

Every change is a bit of a gamble and ramifications can’t always be forecast accurately. But, if you have problems like a failed economy, failed health care system, failed energy policy, failed educational system, collapsing infrastructure, and failed foreign policy, it behooves you to try to fix them.

But, instead of facing these problems head on and cooperatively working together to find solutions, the conservative Republicans have decided the easiest thing to do is to “stop the train” or at least slow it down with constant negative innuendo, a policy of no to everything, conjuring up a wagon load of fears, and repeating outrageous lies over and over again. There are legitimate concerns and need for serious bi-partisan discussion to deal with these problems – for example how should we pay for these solutions. President Obama has been admirably patient in trying to do this – more than I would be.

If you have a company with bad or out-dated product, poor customer service, sinking sales, "tired" inefficient manufacturing facilities, poorly trained and performing workers, status quo loving “fat cat” managers, etc. you better not approach these problems with let’s go slow and take one thing at a time. You do that, and you are out of business. You had better bring in some new high energy management people with creative minds and innovative ideas. You better do some serious R & D. You’d better invest in up-to-date infrastructure, train and motivate your workers, and hustle to retain existing customers and get new ones. And guess what, you are going to have to borrow money big time to get it done! Try as you may, you aren’t going to foresee all the ramifications of your changes in advance. You are going to have to dump some things, cutting your losses when mistakes are made. You will need to tweak, adapt, build and expand on those things that do work. But, you’d better not rely on “smooth talking”, “glad handing”, “do nothing”, “too old”, “too slow”, “fat cat”, “status quo loving conservatives” to get things up and running. There is a great book written by Jennings and Haughton for the business world in 2000 that I’d recommend, it’s not the Big that eat the Small……it’s the Fast that eat the Slow. We’d better be ready or the Big ole USA is going to be eaten by the rest of the world that is getting faster and faster and smarter and smarter.