Adonis Diaries

The political professional: President Barack Obama

There is a qualitative difference between Obama and Bush Junior.

There is qualitative difference between Bill Clinton and Bush Senior.

The differences go beyond Democrats and Republicans or any ideological differences.

The main difference is that Obama and Clinton are professional politicians in their own rights:  they love to communicate with people and comprehend the harsh demands of people and are willing to sacrifice their comfort and peace of mind to serve the people.

They are aware of the attributes and job specifications of the professional politician.  Bill Clinton never talked of “The Evil Empires“, “evil enemies”, “evil axes”, or any evil spirits.

Obama didn’t so far mentioned any evil enemies and he will not.   Obama walked the streets for years and continued his political education and trained and practiced his political qualities and talents; Obama knows what it takes to serve the public and has the correct patience to grab the adequate moments for pressing the programs he promised to pass.

The Bushes and Ronald Reagan were selected and shouldered by their party and supported by the political professionals in their party.

The Bushes (particularly Jr.) and Reagan had no valid qualifications as people lovers; they were mostly living in secluded environment, never relinquishing their life style of comfort and sheltered attitudes.  They get very upset when foreigners disturb their quietude and put pressures on them to meet frequently with aids, congress, read reports, and be forced to make balanced decisions.  That is too much work and unsuited to their dispositions.

The Bushes and Reagan totally relied on their aids and political consultants; not only because they were limited in the mind and need all the help to comprehend the complex interactions in world problems  and those foreigners they cannot understand, but mainly because the laziness of their minds and necessary demands as professional politicians were terribly deficient: they were not people oriented and communication was a necessary evil to them.

The Bushes and Reagan relished shortcuts for resolutions and to adopting simplified models of world’s problems.  Just blurting out who to them is the evil enemy was a mechanism that set their mind at peace and resuming this “coherent” ignorance in their simplistic directions.  Their political consultants felt relieved from exposing  elaborate concepts and detailed knowledge that would upset the limited mind of their Presidents.

Bush Junior must have prayed to fail in the first presidency.  Somehow, he succeeded by a very short margin.  A genius in his team knew his weaknesses and must have whispered in his ear: “God wanted you to win.  God has a project for you.  You cannot fail God’s wishes.”

Bush Junior took seriously this infamous hint and started to believe that he is fulfilling God’s directives.  His political chaperon, Dick Cheney, was too sick physically to educated his protegee and he indeed became senile quickly to be of any value to Bush Junior.  The consultants and aids were selected to be one-sided individuals who were not professional politicians, rather half cooked academics.

The world had to lick his wounds, and the million of collateral  CIVILIAN DAMAGES HAD TO BURY THEIR DEAD.

We all agree that doing politics is a serious profession.  Not anyone is capable of assuming his mandate to serving the community: a voted in political candidate is to be at the beck of his community 24 hours a day and fielding all kinds of requests; he has no reliable methods to control his daily activities and set aside relaxation periods.

And yet, candidates to “serving the public” are not taught and trained in schools like all the other professions.

Actually, most of the students graduating from high schools and universities have a terrible bad connotation for the term “politics” or “doing politics”.

The field of political science does not train people in the social and psychological behavior of people, which are the right tools for doing politics.

Acquiring sketchy understanding of the macro politics by lumping whole nations as a single entity or whole regions as potential enemies is not the correct way for training politicians to thinking rationally and for the good of the people in the long term.

Our problems with our politicians stem from two factors:

First, most of the politicians inherit their jobs, one way or another; they realize soon that they are not up to the requirements and don’t want the hassle; and thus they delegate their responsibilities to people who were not elected in the first place.

Second, politicians don’t work for the long term success because they don’t find the time to read, reflect, and grow their inner power.

Among the very few politicians who satisfy the two criteria of proven records of capable providers and verbal intelligence only those who realize the need to strengthen their inner power through reading and reflection and actually taking short “sabbaticals” away from the media have the potentials to become leaders of people.

In “Hiroshima my love”, Marguerite Dora says:

“Human political intelligence is a hundred folds lower than scientific intelligence”   On the face of it, many would be nodding their heads in consent.

We have got to analyze political intelligence from a different perspective to appreciate that the previous statement is not correct.  When we deal with human behaviors that are:

First, in the hundreds of varieties and ever changing with time and conditions,

Second, the inability of human cognitive powers to assimilate the different interactions of even 4 factors or variables at the same time and

Third, juggling these interactions in real time and under pressure then we can grasp the far complex intelligence requirements of doing and thinking politics.

Democracy is the most difficult and intricate political system: voters have to know the detailed personal characteristics of the candidates that qualify them to be professional politicians.

Instead, voters are sidetracked by political programs that can be altered though individual characters and attitudes.  Without prior selection of politicians based on cognitive and emotional testing for mental capabilities, is tantamount to more of the same repeated errors and mistakes for the public good.

Political intelligence would then be vastly appreciated to its own merit when candidates satisfy cognitive and emotional criteria before submitting their applications to public political posts.

The vote of the people would make much more sense when people are initiated and exposed to the complexities of serving the people and offering a higher value for the term “doing politics”.  

The necessary condition, but not sufficient for a politician, is to have proven that he loves to communicate with people and to field requests around the day as the main job of public server:  He learns to be pragmatic because he is listening to the demands of the people.