Friday, January 25, 2008

maybe it wasn't as much of a draw as I thought

I was just watching FoxNews, when Carl Cameron (the Campaign guy) showed a quick tape of a McCain news conference today where apparently the Senator took dead aim at Mitt Romney, attacking, of all things, his lack of leadership.

Now a lot of this is extrapolated, because the news clip they showed didn't really "blast" anything. But Cameron made it sound like McCain went on a 5-minute gloves-off tirade at the expense of Romney, the end of which was when McCain claimed that he alone among the candidates has shown leadership.

If I'm Romney, I'm loving this. You can attack a lot of things about his record, but Mitt could very easily tout his EXECUTIVE EXPERIENCE in one of the most populated states in the union in very modern history; McCain has led how many people in the last 20 years? Or even better, how many people of different backgrounds? How many budgets has McCain balanced? How many cuts has McCain had to wrestle with? Heck, how many foreign leaders has McCain had to find common ground with--something we can assume Romney had to do as the savior of the Utah Olympics.

In fact, I think this whole thing smacks of desperation from McCain. Of all the remaining major candidates, he's the ONLY ONE who hasn't actually been the executive officer of a million-person "organization". Why would he choose "leadership" as his line of attack here? I think psychologists among us would call this "transference", but I'm not so edumacated in such things.

Now to be sure, McCain has demonstrated leadership in his past, and under conditions that I wouldn't wish upon my biggest nemeses. However, I'm here to tell you that military leadership--at the level McCain demonstrated--and legislative leadership--the kinds of things required of Governors, Mayors, and yes, the President--are wholly dissimilar.

And the funny thing is that McCain was trying to show a difference between good "managerial" skills--which he fully recognizes Romney to possess--and good "leadership" skills. As if the two things are mutually exclusive. Which, to be sure, in some people is entirely true.

But it isn't true of everyone. Romney strikes me as the kind of guy who isn't limited to only doing one thing or the other well.

I guess that's the difference between leadership circa 1970 and leadership circa 1990.

And thank you, Senator McCain, for pointing out the one true glaring omission from your resume: lack of legislative executive experience. I imagine at least one of the candidates is going to have a little fun with this.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Good for people to know.

6:46 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home