This morning I called my 84-year-old mother on the East Coast to say hello. I told her I was calling to ask her what she went as for Halloween. She laughed and said she’d gone as herself. So then I asked her if now she was the old lady who scares all the kids on the block. She laughed at that, too. We talked some more and I made some other crack and she chuckled and said, “You’re too much.” That’s a high compliment. It was a good start to the day. Then I went on to my playwriting workshop, and my next audience experience.
Here’s what I know about leadership from my reading of Sun Tzu and Macchiavelli: Being nice is easy. Being powerful and feared is better.
One would have thought Barack Obama knew this. I didn’t expect George W. Bush to have read them (although Dick Cheney could have written sequels), but I assumed that Obama had read “The Art of War” and “The Prince.” Read them and understood them. But there he was the morning after his electoral “shellacking,” promising to work closely with the very people who that same day were saying that their primary mission is to restrict or undo his achievements thus far, and to deny him a second term. I’m trying to decide whether the appropriate word for Obama’s response is “feckless” or “craven.” Until the final month before the election, he hadn’t stood up for what he believes in, had not propounded his principles in a way that would resonate and draw respect, and now here he was the morning after the mid-terms again folding his tent. What the moment demanded was Churchill. What we got was Neville Chamberlain. Obama is the president of the United States. The Republicans took one chamber of the Congress, not two. What can they pass without the president? Nothing. What can they undo? Nothing. How can he not know this?
Unless, maybe, he is ready to employ a tactic from the masters of intrigue: deception. If I were Obama, I would put on every outward sign of “cooperation” for the next six months, feeding my foes’ underestimation of me, while sticking a shiv in them every chance I got. Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s what he’s going to do. He still hasn’t learned that he was right the first time, when he sized these people up as his enemies.
On Tuesday, California voters rejected Proposition 19, which would have legalized marijuana.
The next day, federal authorities found a tunnel leading from San Diego into a drug warehouse over the border in Tijuana. And with it, they found, wait for it, 25 tons of marijuana prepped for sale, most of it, no doubt, in California.
If only they’d found it a week or two earlier, perhaps voters here would have passed Prop 19, declaring victory on one battlefront in the “war on drugs,” and then we could have moved on to other problems that are harder to solve.
Just so you know, if you put anything anywhere on the web, I now own it. (And if I use your stuff and it’s crummy, I’m billing you.) Because hey, that’s how it works.
The election isn’t until Tuesday, but I’d like to thank Meg Whitman for the public service she’s rendered in personally trying to plug California’s deficit by buying goods and services here. She’s still slightly shy of spending $150 million of her own money as promised, but as I said, there are still two days to go. I thank her, and so do all the printers and caterers and designers and consultants (including one who’s billing $90,000 a month). We never believed you were a fiscal conservative anyway, and we know you don’t care about democracy since you’ve never voted. But when you promised to fix California’s deficit, clearly, you truly meant to do all you could. Personally.
