Kamala Harris has not found her stride closing on election day. What we’ve discovered about somebody who is increasingly the most recognizable “charity” hire in our nation-the veritable poster child-is that she long ago plateaued and is now attempting to exceed her pinnacle.
A classic “wannabe” who has never been.
And it’s not working! The spotlight caresses and marinates some, while others are simply exposed. That’s not to say she has not achieved in her lifetime. That is to say it that her experiences do not appear to have prepared her for this momentous step up.
Considering how long the term has seemingly been in use, it can be surprising to discover the Peter Principle came about a scant double nickels ago in 1969. The phrase entered the business lexicon immediately, as did myriad management categorization terms and techniques that have been foisted upon emerging executives to enhance their skills.
If you were Harris, it would be excruciatingly painful to find yourself in such a position where you are fully exposed for all to see, with no respite in sight or hope of finding solace in your routine of staying out of the public view and not communicating.
Where deep down you know you have obtained status through artifice and dubious means-sleeping your way to positions, appointment to public positions without the normal checks and balances, rising to the proverbial top without any of the normal wire brushing along the way that is often beneficial as it removes rough spots and edges and provides wake-up calls in the form of trait “alignments.”
The process often toughens and hardens the soul, tempers character and develops capability through scrutiny, introspection and necessity by the need for survival.
Going through that proverbial “ringer” over time shapes, molds and extrudes-although I prefer exposes-character. Because a person who trods that path but is somehow “above” the strife and fray, entitled through relationships, special treatment or whatever, immune to the scrutiny-the crucible, as it were- without what used to be known as the “school of hard knocks” path-somewhat of the thrown into the deep end of the pool without a float technique-can dodge, avoid and be evasive in their interactions for only so long before their day of reckoning crashes down upon them.
Such a process tends to drive a person to cope by leveraging the skills of those under them in a way that is not healthy, managing through the expertise of their more experienced underlings. The process by which they supervise is the path to being a manager, an underrated and very necessary skill-except when the position calls for and demands a leader.
A manager will adopt coping mechanisms-many times to their detriment-that all too often sets them up for eventual failure. The lack of character exposes their coping techniques as inadequate for all to see.
Because there will come a day where the tactical coping methodology that has carried the day for years-perhaps decades-fails when it comes to strategic skills and requirements-like clear thinking, communications ability, social intelligence quotient borne of the crucible of pressure, and innate capability to respond that has unfortunately simply never developed.
This problem lives on in many sectors of business today as “titular heads” are hired because of their schools, family name, connections and “schtuff.” Perhaps the best-and worst-example of this often-disastrous hiring practice was in the banking business. Woman predominated in many of the banks, particularly at the local level. In our family we experienced this with several close relatives who eventually worked their way to run the day-to-day operations of the banks where they worked.
But they worked for often inexperienced, happy-go-lucky, ne’re-do-well, connected males who breezed in as clueless supervisors from day one and eventually moved on after burnishing their resume.
This issue or problem is alive and well in government, where it is much more pronounced than in the private sector, where the focus on profitability and keeping stockholders happy often provides a sanity check for leaders who don’t cut it.
Tenure and longevity count far more than skills, knowledge and ability in government. At the upper echelons where heads of agencies dwell-particularly in military or Department of Defense organizations-there is a practice that is particularly deleterious to progress wherein many of the senior managers who run the business unit-divisions, directorates, financial, human development-have an inordinate amount of power and influence over the conduct of business as contrasted with their often-short term bosses.
Perhaps best captured by the sentiment of former Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper (Lt Gen, USAF Ret,) who told the workforce of the National Imagery And Mapping Agency (now a three letter-the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency) upon his change of responsibility on 12 September 2001 that he “learned a valuable lesson while I was the Defense Intelligence Agency Director: government civilians can hold their breath for 3 years and simply outwait the boss. I learned that you can’t make serious changes incrementally over time when you have a “rear guard” fighting you below the waterline on every incremental change.”
His agreement with Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld was for him to serve five years as director for that reason.
People mistakenly breathed a sigh of relief, assuming that meant that some of the rumored changes were just rumors. They were wrong-he went on to “rip the band aid off” and institute significant and long-lasting changes.
Clapper stood down one of NIMA’s largest bloated Defense Mapping Agency legacy business unis-Plans and Customer Operations- standing up InnoVision Directorate to focus on technology and research and development that he described as the future-the “After Next-” while clearly delineating the role of Enterprise Directorate working the “Now,” and Acquisition Directorate working on delivering the “Next.”
Clapper was a leader-who-albeit-has gone off the deep end over the last 12 years-and only resurfaces to show his degradation into political mediocrity, wrong causes and the seeming bitterness that accrues to those who out themselves as political hacks for all the wrong reasons.
Which is a long way to talk about Harris’ lack of character, personality, gravitas: she is the epitome of what you get with modern, particularly California-style management training.
In a government game where survival of the fittest somewhat rules the day, Biden is the absolute poster child incarnate, Peter Principle, trophy winning guy. A survivor: a man who has been in government for 50 years. Who Robert Gates rightly observed has been “wrong about every major political decision over the last forty years.” Gates wrote that in his book without malice: just a statement of fact. It has now been 50 years.
Gates-upon hearing about the Afghanistan withdrawal-was reportedly sick to his stomach for several days.
This is not about Biden, but he exemplifies how longevity rewards even the dimmest bulb in the pack if they can just endure over their peers. This is particularly true on the hill in congress where seniority results in plum committee assignments, culminating in leadership and real power as defined on the hill. Just to mention a few, Schifty Schiff, Barney Franks Ted Kennedy, Joe Biden, Maxine Waters, Nanny Peloozi, John McCain, Chuck Schumer, McConnel, etc., etc…Some of the best that money can buy….
These people ended up in government for the long term, running our country into the ground with their ignorant ways, taste for power and the dollar, and lack of regard for their bosses and our tax dollars. The epitome of what the Founders warned and safeguarded against.
It is sad and a sorry state of affairs to observe that Harris was anointed by Biden and then the democrat party writ large for many of the same reasons that saw Biden survive some of the worst campaigning in political history during his many runs for president.
It was thought to be a stroke of genius when democrat strategists came up with what can only be described as the equivalent of the Muhammad Ali “rope a dope” strategy against George Foreman, a genius political strategy to “hide the candidate for their own good.”
Coupled with election lawfare, changing election rules in key states to foster the use of mail-in ballots under the guise of COVID and to eliminate the typical scrutiny that reduced rejection rates to near zero from the typical >11%.
Followed by lawfare of the highest order that continues to today.
As a famous politician would observe, “there they go again.” Harris being a far worse-challenging-political reclamation project than Biden-which is hard to believe but look at the result of her efforts-the “hide the sausage/candidate strategy” that they’ve now ridden like a favorite mule these past several elections-with great assist from the LSMBTGA-seems to be the tactic of the future for democrat candidates.
Do you run on the top ten issues of concern to the voters when you are an incumbent-that are issues because of your administration-or do you focus on painting your opponent as someone who might kill 6M people, invade countries, abolish laws, go after enemies, threat to democracy, start wars, etc., etc.?
Harris will likely go down in history as the worst candidate in US political history. Her campaign may provide the most valuable lesson learned for others in how not to conduct a campaign in the age of the internet, alternative media era.
Hopefully the democrats will suffer one of the worst defeats since Reagon and will shift to the center and respect their voters a little bit more than has been demonstrated through the coup d’etat that anointed Harris as their candidate, without receiving a single-not one-vote. The only thing she has been good at is-well-nothing-and Word Salad video clips and memes.
The pressure of having to present as a leader is crushing Harris’ spirit. You can see it in her face, actions, demeanor and personality as well as physical changes. Intense pressure that comes from responsibility-whether real, perceived, imagined-wears on you. Even trained and experienced leaders feel it and are influenced-changed-by the day-to-day pressure of leadership.
Any who have led organizations both large and small have felt the often-crushing mantle of leadership. Command in the military of units large and small-it is almost irrelevant as to size-is a life changing event. The structure of the military fosters the development of leadership as you gain experience, progressing up through the ranks in charge of platoons, companies, battalions and on up the hierarchy.
It is the same in other walks of life. There is no substitute for this path of experience where the responsibility and capability grow at every step.
We talk about management, leadership and character a lot. In the military leaders grow organically by necessity. If you don’t know it already, the difference between leadership and management is that you can’t manage people to buy into concepts greater than themselves where they are willing to give their lives for a cause. You simply can’t manage people into selfless service.
That is not to paint Biden or Harris as unpatriotic: simply not the point.
But consider that a government civil servant who stays on long enough becomes an Anthony Fauci type, where they know how to work all the machines, they know everybody in power whose rings they need to kiss, and they get rewarded for knowing how to skirt all the processes intended to keep them in check and accountable to We The People by congress.
I’m going to close with a classic Army story that is one of my favs. A saying in the Army that increasingly made the rounds in the early 1990s when President Clinton was leveraging the “peace dividend” of the dissolution of the Soviet Union to draw down the military was the concept of being at the end of a “mediocre career.” It was not a new phrase.
As in “How does it feel to be in the throes of a mediocre career?” I worked with an operations and plans officer in Germany in the 1980s who was a genius when it came to war plans. He had a bit of an issue with the bottle, and it brought out the cave man in him, often prompting him to fight those around him he felt were “underappreciative of his talents,” which all too often were his bosses. An otherwise stalwart, smart, well-read military history genius when free of the grape.
He had been passed over once for LTC and had come under the scrutiny of our Assistant Division Commander, an irascible character who himself was going through his own failure to make general officer. Who never failed to get a barb in about the MAJ’s status in the Army, getting to the peak of a “mediocre career.”
Many of us were on pins and needles the day the promotion lists came in-I later went through my own experience in this regard-but I was somewhat the anointed one among a dozen or more of us who worked war plans for our respective organizations-to get the list from our G-1/admin section somewhat on the sly from bud MAJ Crosby and look through the list and declare his fate.
I will never forget it-he made it! He didn’t skip a beat, he left our vault like a bat out of hell, abruptly running upstairs to the ADC’s Office, where we later learned he burst into his office, jumped on his little coffee table, yelled at the top of his lungs “I’ve got your mediocre career right here-and you can f’n kiss it” and he dropped trow and provided his furry posterior for buffing. It was that kind of climate at 2d Armored Division (FWD) in Germany, prepared to fight hordes…
Harris as president would disappear like the Wicked Witch of the West melting, the pressure collapsing her spirit and body like an 85-year-old. I don’t wish her ill, but I do wish her to be vanquished for all time from the public square and having any role in our lives.
Max Dribbler
3 November 2024
LSMBTG: Lamestream media echo chamber (LMEC-L) social media (SM) big tech tyrants (BT) government (G) academia (A)
Follow AFNN
Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/afnnusa
Telegram: https://t.me/joinchat/2_-GAz…
Twitter: @AFNNUSA
GETTR: @AFNN_USA
CloutHub: @AFNN_USA
Patriot.Online: @AFNN