Anyway, I wanted to comment on President-Elect Obama (does anyone forget that's his last name and not his first name? I keep on doing that).
One theory of leadership in organizational behavior that I really liked was tranformational leadership. It was developed previously, but became more popular when Bass elaborated on it. It is related to transactional leadership and is meant to dichomotize leadership styles according to how the leader interacts with the followers.
Transactional leadership is a style that is characterized by interaction that is mostly transactional in nature. Simply put, what occurs between leader and follower is mostly an exchange of services that has almost no affective (affect was more purpose, it's a popular word in psychology) consequences for subordinates. A superior needs something done and asks the subordinate to complete the task, end of story.
Transformational leadership is the kind of leadership that not only involves the necessary transactional exchanges between leader-follower, but also serves to inspire followers to trascend their own interests, basically transforming the group to the point where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
A lot of people think Obama is this transformational leader. His campaign was probably something that was inevitable as Byron York points out. There was just no way a GOP candidate was going to win this election year, not with the intensity of the Bush hatred, not with the financial markets nose-diving the way they did in the weeks right before November 4th. Even with everything that Obama had going for him he only came out with a 6-point win. Michael Barone gives more detail on this topic here. Not that his campaign doesn't deserve credit for their win, but a lot of things fell just the way he needed them to for him to win the presidency.
So far it seems that Obama is just as far left as many conservatives have feared. It was recently revealed that Obama has in fact been in communication with Hamas leaders in Palestine long before the election last Tuesday. And just as was mentioned in this Powerline post, now those unsavory connections that Obama seems so inclined towards throughout his life seem to be much more relevant now.
It would have been nice to know about the cordial relationship between Obama's advisers and Hamas during the campaign. But, of course, it was an article of faith in the mainstream media that Obama's many unsavory and radical associations were somehow irrelevant to any expectation as to how he would govern as President.
As was mentioned by Valerie Jarett, co-chair of Obama's transition team, he will be ready to "rule" on day one. The worst part is that one of his first orders of business as President will most likely to be to revoke the executive order to clear the way to expand offshore drilling. Today gas here in Provo is $2.25. Kind of amazing after considering what we had to endure over the summer.
And this blogger details some of Obama's approach to the economy. The point that I hate the most in there is the idea of taxing oil profits to give consumers a $1000 rebate check. A tax on the company is really a tax on the consumer and will just be reflected in higher gas prices. It's so counterproductive. And then also raising minimum wage up to $9.50 by 2011. That's only going to result in higher rates of unemployment for unskilled workers, i.e. teens.
What's most annoying about these liberal ideas is that on the surface they appear to be great, but the costs of actually carrying them are enormous, and often have further reaching consequences that what they had really intended.
In any case, what has happened the last few years with Democrats coming back into power is just a natural result of the two-party system that we favor in this country. Jim Geraghty details it well here:
Vast swaths of the voting public have little or no memory of Democratic failures. The last time that party controlled the presidency and two houses, they passed the biggest tax increase in history; failed to pass health care; failed to reform welfare; U.S. troops had been pulled out of Somalia in the face of a foe that resembled extras from Mad Max and the arsenal of democracy’s attention was focused on Haiti, of all places. The Clinton administration reached farce when the surgeon general declared she wanted to teach teenage boys how to masturbate in classrooms, and in the perfect symbol of a world gone off the rails, the World Series was cancelled.
But people forget about yesterday’s problems. And as they focus on the problems of today and the majority party’s failure to fix them, they get more sympathetic to the other guys.
And since 1994, Democrats have been able to say, “our ideas would work perfectly, if we could just get it past those obstructionists standing in our way!” Their ads have chanted it, their cheerleaders in the media have echoed it, and their base fervently believes it. It’s ironic that next to nothing on their policy agenda is new or different from the last time they ran the executive and legislative branch – the government can institute a health care system that will take care of everyone and all the costs can be covered by higher taxes on the rich; industry is polluting the earth and we can solve it by taxing carbon; we’ll stop Republicans from destroying Social Security; we can expand the good work of volunteerism by throwing massive amounts of federal funds at those programs. Many of them still believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that gun ownership is the cause of crime instead of part of the solution...
The kind of transformational leadership that America is looking for is not here yet. The swing back to the left in the current political landscape is just the country regressing to the mean. Just like Geraghty mentioned, the GOP had dominated for so long that the general public has little collective memory of how poorly liberal policies actually work when implemented.
It's going to take a few years, but the country will swing back. The Carter Presidency in 1980 made way for Ronald Reagan to emerge. Democratic control of the legislative branch and Bill Clinton in the White House in 1992 paved the path for Newt Gingrich to reassemble the conservative camps that led to the reign that followed for the next ten years.
With the return of a number of tried and tested Iraq veterans there will be a whole new wave of conservative politicians. There are a number of possibilities as it stands right now: General Petraeus? Sarah Palin? Mitt Romney? Or maybe someone else that we haven't even heard of yet.
Rest assured, as much as people might like to think otherwise, the messiah still hasn't come.
Not yet.
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