Dan

Calabrese

Read Dan's bio and previous columns here

October 22, 2008
The Dashing New President! So Exciting and Different! But Then . . .

There once was a woebegone situation that begged for change. The natives were restless, tired of the same old thing year after year after year. President after president failed to inspire, and failed even more miserably to produce the results the people wanted.

Everyone agreed it was time to go in a different direction, and to find a different kind of president.

And along came just such a man. When he appeared on television, talking about the right way to do things, he was a star. He had never been an executive decision-maker at any level, but he had been in trenches, working alongside blue-collar types. With the way he expressed himself – his boldness and his confidence – you couldn’t help but be convinced that he had what it would take to turn this struggling craft into a smooth-sailing ship.

So he became the president, to great acclimation. He talked of change and resolve. He talked of a new attitude. He cleared the decks of all the old administration and brought in his own people. It was time for a complete change. It was time for a new direction.

And the people cheered, confident that change they could believe in was coming.

The first year was not so good. OK, it was really bad. But hey, given the mess he inherited, you couldn’t expect change overnight. These things would take time. The public started wondering if things had really been that bad under the old president – this seemed even worse! – but this was still their exciting new president and he had a plan. If a little pain would be necessary to get to the change we had been waiting for, then faith in the president would be necessary.

The second year was pretty bad too. The president announced with determination that failure was not acceptable, and started making changes among his team. For the first time, people started remembering that he had never been a leader before, and started wondering if he really knew how to make executive decisions.

But things had been so bad under the old presidents, it hardly seemed fair to be impatient with the new one. At least he was different. At least he knew how to speak the language of hope and success. At least he knew how to give us that shiver – a tingle, if you will – to bolster our confidence that a guy like this, so gifted, so eloquent, couldn’t possibly fail.

The third year was not so good. The fourth year was pretty bad.

And the people started turning on the president. They started asking, “Whose idea was it to make this guy president? What had he ever accomplished? He sounded good on television, but he had never done a job like this – ever.”

The people had not asked these questions when the president was chosen. Back then, they were excited by the things he said and the way he said them, and by the fact that he was so different from those who had come before. It was only now, as it became increasingly clear that he was in over his head, that the people started to realize that looking and sounding good doesn’t make you ready to be a president.

Bigger problems started arising. The president became more and more averse to being criticized. He had a plan and he was sticking to his plan, and he was sure that all these people who were criticizing him just weren’t as smart as he was. He’d been handed a mess when he took over, he reminded everyone, and it wasn’t easy to clean up such a mess.

But as the years went on, and the mess remained, the people started to see it as his mess. And they weren’t so willing to let him get away with it when he blamed the people before him.

Finally, when it became clear to everyone that the president really shouldn’t have been put in charge, he was ousted. The people honked their horns and danced in the streets, and looked forward to a new president – one who actually had some experience doing this sort of thing, and not someone who just looked and sounded good.

It will take the Detroit Lions a long time to recover from the disaster of Matt Millen’s presidency, but at least they will never again choose a president just because he looks like a leader and sounds good on TV.

Wait. Who did you think I was talking about?

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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