The Fulfillment of Foreshadowing

My last two posts hinted at posts to come, so I figured I'd better address the points foreshadowed before they slip from my increasingly slippery memory.  The first had to do with the track record, or lack thereof, of a candidate for office, and the second had to do with a business owner having built his or her own business.  And both are related to our current POTUS, so I'll address them both in one fell swoop.

My initial problem with President Obama - then merely Candidate Obama - had nothing to do with his race, his background, or his place of birth, though most of his ardent supporters have accused me, and people like me (i.e., anyone who isn't a fan of his), of being "afraid of a black man in the White House," or of being a "birther" (to tell you the truth, until about a year ago, I thought the term was a derogatory swipe at those who are opposed to abortion; I didn't know what the term actually meant until someone pointed it out to me).

I'm not afraid of a black man - or woman - in the White House.  I embrace it.  I'd vote for a man like J.C. Watts - admittedly a Republican - or a Democrat like Newark Mayor Cory Booker, in a ... well, a Newark minute.  These are men with clearly stated plans, and proven track records of accomplishments, of getting things done.  I'd probably vote for Condie Rice, too, if she'd run.

In fact, I'm not even afraid of an unqualified man or woman in the White House.  In my humble opinion, we have one of those now, and I don't recall being afraid as a result.  Regardless who the president is, I'm going to try and make the best of it, and endeavor to prosper as a result.

Let me continue this detour from my originally intended train of thought for a moment.  President Obama's extension of the Bush tax cuts ... wait a second.  If he extended them, are they not now the Obama tax cuts?  Or, if we want to be politically non-divisive and attribute them to no single president, since they've now spanned two administrations, should we call them the current tax cuts, since they remain in place?  And are they really cuts, since nothing's been cut for a while, it's merely been extended, so that they're simply the current tax rates?  It's so confusing.

Ah well, no matter.  These tax cuts have benefitted me, as I fall within the group of taxpayers whose rates have been reduced by them.  And as much as I disagree with Mr. Obama's cuts in the FICA tax withholding rate, as it only serves to exacerbate the Social Security shortfall, I have benefitted from that as well.  So why should I fear him?  He's been good for me in the short run, even if he's been bad for the economy overall, and may be bad for me in the long run.

As for where he was born, I could care less.  Though I chuckle when I hear the left chide Mitt Romney for not disclosing more of his tax returns, claiming that by refusing to do so, he's the one creating the controversy.  Yet, when President Obama refuses the simple step of disclosing his birth certificate, the "birthers" are the ones who created the controversy.  But such is the nature of our new liberal-speak, which seems rather Orwellian to me.

In any event, if he were, after one term in office, doing a whiz-bang job, and it was suddenly revealed that he had been born in, say, New Guinea, or Angola (the country, not the prison in Louisiana), or on Mars, I'd be first in line to say, "Who cares?  He's doing a whiz-bang job.  Let's re-elect him anyway, let's change the rules."

Nor do I care what his middle name is.  It could be Gerbil-Karma for all I care.

No, it matters not to me the color of his skin, his gender, his name, or his birthplace.  What matters to me is that he was ushered into office on a complete lack of experience, but an ability to make a pretty speech, laced with empty buzzwords like "Hope" and "Change" and the Bob the Builder-inspired "Yes we can!", with no one questioning the substance behind those words.

Let's break it down: he gradutated from Columbia University in 1983 with a degree in political science.  He worked for a year at a publishing and consulting firm, then for another year at a lobbying firm.  After that he was a community organizer (what is that, anyway?) for five years, then went to law school at Harvard, graduating in 1991, after which he worked as a civil rights attorney until 1994.

Then, he threw his hat in the ring to run for the Illinois State Senate, at the tender age of 34.  He won the race in 1996, and served just one term before running for the US House of Representatives.  He lost that bid, but was re-elected to the Illinios Senate for a second term, then a third.  While he was running for that third term, he was already prepping for a shot at the US Senate, hiring political consultant David Axelrod.

A year after being re-elected to the Illinois Senate, and just seven years after first gaining that seat, he announced his candidacy for the US Senate, in 2003.  He was elected in 2004, and took office the next year.  A scant two years later, he announced his candidacy for the presidency, but of course he'd planned that course of action well before, as all candidates do.

So Mr. Obama, a career politician, has spent virtually all of his political career campaigning for the next step.  Little wonder that, now that there is no next step above his current office (except perhaps "lobbyist"), he hasn't the first earthly idea of what to do.  He missed most of his US Senate votes, and one can only surmise from the timing of his campaigning that he missed a good number of state senate votes too.

It's as if we were all so sick of GWB, we looked out in the parking lot, pointed at the first dude we saw, and said, "There - that guy."

"Hope" and "Change" have now been replaced with "Forward," equally bereft of meaning, not that that's a deterrent to his avid - or rabid? - followers.  It's a word, and if it's chanted enough, by enough people, again in Orwellian fashion, it creates fervor.  (For an example, see the DNC highlights.)

He does give a pretty speech.  I remember listening to his inauguration speech with rapt attention, actually tearing up at a couple of points, and thinking, "Yeah - maybe this is the guy!"  Immediately afterward, I couldn't help thinking of the line uttered by Stephen the Irishman in Braveheart, after William Wallace's stirring "Sons of Scotland" speech: "Fine speech.  Now what do we do?"

And it's been the "now what?", or lack thereof, that has troubled me ever since.

So my preference is for a candidate who's actually done something, and whose speeches actually outline a plan.  I listened for that in President Obama's recent acceptance speech, which began by falsely criticizing his opponent for not laying out a plan.  I listened carefully for some details on what he'd do, and how he'd do it.

I'm still listening.

As for the now-infamous "You didn't build that" speech (which has been spun by his supporters to not really mean what he has since repeated several times that he did, in fact, mean), I'm living proof to the contrary, as are scores upon scores of Americans.

I didn't start this business, nor do I have an ownership interest.  I'm just a hired gun.  But from the time I started with this company 20 years ago, various factions within the credit union industry - our primary clientele - have sought to limit what we do.

These organizations, which form a wholesale tier of the industry that I won't bother to explain right now, are called corporate credit unions.  And throughout our firm's history, they've had an ownership stake, either directly or indirectly, in our company.

Now, what we do competes to a degree with what they do, or at least they've always thought so.  So, whether it was in the best interests of the credit unions we all serve or not, corporate credit unions have always sought to limit our access to credit unions, thus limiting our business, and limiting credit unions' options in the process.

At the same time, our business is highly cyclical, with periods of extremely strong profitability, and periods of losses.  So we don't need more hurdles thrown in front of us.  Yet our owners - the very people who benefit from our gains and suffer from our losses - have done just that, or at least a group of them have.  This, on top of the usual hurdles that our regulators - part of the very government that Mr. Obama claims made things happen so that businesses could be built - routinely toss in our path.

In spite of the regulatory hurdles, in spite of a perverse ownership structure in which some of our owners seek to prevent us from doing what we can to achieve ultimate success, in spite of employees occasionally defecting and trying to steal our business from us, sometimes attempting to destroy information on their way out - we've succeeded, over the past 14 years under my leadership, and with the help of a lot of smart, talented, dedicated people.

Meanwhile, a number of the very corporate credit unions that used to try to limit what we do - including the largest of them all, and our former parent organization - are out of business today.  We're not.  We're still here.

So did we build this?  Mr. Obama, you can bet your White House beer recipe we did.  And anytime you want to try to persuade me otherwise, you just name the time and place.  I look forward to the opportunity for that debate.  Oh, and I'll buy the beer; you've spent enough of the taxpayers' money already.