Running a business does not equate to running a country.

This is a guest post from my friend and fellow blogger  Karla Porter:

Perspective on election to the Office of the POTUS


 
In support of Fact Check: Mitt Romney’s Convention Speech, the worst in my opinion is claiming unemployment of 23,000,000 when the Department of Labor and Industry doesn’t calculate it that way - no matter who is sitting in the chair. I am well aware what politicians on both sides of the aisle pull but the last thing we need is mass hysteria that things are getting worse than they really are and that there is some puff daddy who is going to fix them up all pretty and nice because he knows how to run a business. Running a business does not equate to running a country.
When candidates get to the podium they are speaking about their vision - not what they can accomplish in 4 years. Not one president has ever accomplished all he has set out to do during his term. It irks me to no end to hear ‘We need to take this country back and make it great again’..
A CEO has the power to make decisions within his organization that the head of state and head of government has no authority over. His constitutional job is mainly to carry out the policy of Congress.

• He controls only a limited amount of funding for combat troop engagement as Commander in Chief.
• Congress has the power to over-ride his veto power.
• Congress must approve his personnel choices.
• The presidency is not really a policy-making position.

One thing the president does have very much in common with a CEO is the job of cleaning up the prior administration’s mess as best he can in 4 years while trying to move the country in a positive direction. Perhaps a more befitting title would be Country Manager or even Sanitation Manager.
What point in time would you have the country taken back to exactly? It has been at war almost 90% of its existence and its economy depends largely on the global war machine.

Would you go back to the American Revolution with no money to pay soldiers and ridiculous amounts of death and loss and no antibiotics or reasonable anesthesia? How about mass murder of indigenous peoples? Perhaps the time of slavery? Pioneering in a wagon making your way out west in the heat and dust? The Prohibition Era, Black lung death from coal mines? The Great Depression? The war times since WWII and leading to the present day?

Perhaps the best time in our history was a short period of time from 1865 - 1873 during The Gilded Age, from 1865 - 1900 which saw the greatest period of economic growth in American history. Eight whole years of incredible advancement and increased prosperity. Or maybe the nine-year period during the Roaring 20’s, until the Wall Street Crash of ‘29. 

The truth is that the prosperous times have been extremely rare in our short history as a nation, still very young and volatile. We have not settled economically or sociologically into our own. We haven’t gotten to the point we can say we should go back to yet and to say such a thing is both extremely naive and near-sighted.

Our very violent ambitious beginnings - too often portrayed as peace loving and tolerant pilgrims who ran away so they could pray to God in their preferred fashion and eat corn pudding with red people around a campfire - are not over. 

We have as many hybrid, positive and desirable characteristics as a nation and polyglot of peoples as we do negative, weak and undesirable ones. Our non-homogeneous culture of owner-created global superiority and mythological divinely chosen identity is nothing but a fairy tale. We can think and say we are the best and be the best patriots we are capable of. We are no more special or deserving or ordained than anyone else on earth and perhaps only when we realize that will we come to terms with who we really are.

As a nation, we will continue to struggle, grow our still budding culture, grow into our big girl pants, and continue to experience economic ebbs and flows for the unforeseeable future. It is the forethought of the framers of the flexible living Constitution we inherited that will allow us to prevail over time.
It’s not Obama or Romney, just like it wasn’t Harrison or Taylor.

Join Karla and the rest of the fab 4 for Blogcon  , Saturday , September 29th at LCCC at the god awful time of 8AM. Hey, I'm a night shift worker.