I remember back to the days of Jimmy Carter when I think I first heard this desire expressed. It struck me as wrong then and I’m that much more convinced it is wrong now. That is the idea that somehow what this government needed was a good CEO with management experience to run things.

Well, we’ve got a Harvard MBA now, former executive in charge of more than one failed company, in charge in Washington D.C. Of course I use “in charge” loosely here because it doesn’t appear he’s really got a handle of much of anything.

This conflating of management and governance has been happening in many sectors in this country over the last few decades. The idea that we need government leaders who can “manage” represents incredibly faulty thinking. What we need is someone to provide leadership in the form of vision and scope for those in management (read: the government bureaucracy and political institutions) to fulfill and do so while retaining real accountability for what happens. Managers are natural followers, when led appropriately they go where they are pointed and they operate within the parameters provided. But absent any leadership they drop into survival mode and in survival mode managers don’t do accountability, it is lesson #1 in business school I suspect. They learn to create committees, appoint more managers, and buffer themselves from the effects of their decisions as well as learning to create sufficient scapegoats to take the fall so they don’t have to suffer from the impact of their own decisions.

But now, as I said, we’ve got ourselves a real MBA in there, a manager of managers, the blind leading the blind, and look what is happening. Bush’s response to Katrina, as the NYTimes points out in today’s editorial, has been a monument to the glories of management at the expense of leadership.

George W. Bush gave one of the worst speeches of his life yesterday, especially given the level of national distress and the need for words of consolation and wisdom. In what seems to be a ritual in this administration, the president appeared a day later than he was needed. He then read an address of a quality more appropriate for an Arbor Day celebration: a long laundry list of pounds of ice, generators and blankets delivered to the stricken Gulf Coast. He advised the public that anybody who wanted to help should send cash, grinned, and promised that everything would work out in the end.

Managers know one thing and one thing only, Look Busy. In the absence of leadership they engage in activity for the sake of activity. They are not engaged in producing real outcomes for which they could be held accountable, only engaged in activity and in divining what the most acceptable activity might be (and there is little penalty for guessing wrong) while avoiding any mention of what outcome is desired or aimed for.

I worked for a time as a Systems Administrator for a major financial firm which shall remain nameless. Since I worked in Systems whenever some new manager would get installed in some department, often one whose function they barely understood, there would be a sudden demand for us to work long hours of overtime installing new phones, moving and reconfiguring networks and installing new software in a department that had finally managed to understand how to function after the last change in management. We did this of course, because the new manager had to put his or her stamp on the place, to make the activity their activity, not their predecessors. Since they often didn’t understand how the department they’d just inherited functioned, a result of a promotional policy aimed at giving managers “broad experience”, the only way they could have an impact was to rearrange the deck chairs and leave the actual day to day operation of the place, and all meaningful decisionmaking, up to the supervisors who worked under them who had worked their up to supervisor by doing the actual work of the department.

Managers love activity, are terrified of accountability and have no clue as to what outcomes they need to produce because not only has no one told them what they are they also have no real experience upon which to base a clear enunciation of outcomes. The Peter Principle is an understatement.

So we now have the MBA President, who’s idea of leadership is to come home from his 5 week semi-annual vacation a day early, say as little as possible, and set up a few committees.

This is also how he is conducting himself in international affairs. In all things in which he involves this country he is all about process and not at all about results. So we have a “war’ in Iraq because, well, we have a war in Iraq. Even beforehand the desired outcomes of that fiasco were somewhat facile, to be kind. First it was getting back for 9/11 but then it turned out that Iraq had nothing to do with that and besides, what sort of outcome does “revenge” produce? Then it was about removing the threat of WMD,which might have fit the description of a real outcome had that actually been a problem…but of course it wasn’t. Making up fake outcomes doesn’t count because at some point you have to say you’ve already done it and since there weren’t any WMD that is kind of tough to do.

Then of course it became “regime change” and that’s all well and good but one has to wonder at the price he was willing to pay to get one guy out of office. We’ve got “regime change” but the outcome does not appear to be a better Iraq, if anything it is worse off now than it was before, and the cost of that little management venture was far too great to justify. And yet, rather than face the reality of the cost of his actions and make a sensible accounting of the costs in comparison to the results, he instead chooses the management course of protecting his activity at the expense of its impact.

So what we hear is that we must engage in a war because the war is the thing, not the cost. It is war at any cost with this president because to admit the war isn’t working is to admit he is a failure and he cannot do that. Like any manager his well-being is more important to him than his company’s, or his country’s. So he proudly declares himself a War President at every opportunity, “stay the course” becomes his mantra because the course is more important than the destination. It’s why it is more important to him to vacation and buff himself up bike riding with Lance Armstrong and why he says thing like:

“I think the people want the president to be in a position to make good, crisp decisions and to stay healthy,” he said when asked about bike riding while a grieving mom wanted to speak with him. “And part of my being is to be outside exercising.”

The disaster in the Gulf is highlighting the disaster this President has visited on his own country and the world. He is a self-absorbed, narcissistic and addictive personality that has the future of this nation and the world in his hands and that is a frightening thing. The people of Iraq have already paid a high price for his pride and now it appears that our own citizens must pay a similar price.

May the world forgive us all.

[edited to add this find from Talking Points Memo]

This column in yesterday’s Post says that FEMA is being “systematically downgraded and all but dismantled by the Department of Homeland Security.” Later it says: “This year it was announced that FEMA is to ‘officially’ lose the disaster preparedness function that it has had since its creation. The move is a death blow to an agency that was already on life support. In fact, FEMA employees have been directed not to become involved in disaster preparedness functions, since a new directorate (yet to be established) will have that mission.”

That’s exactly the sort of thing a manager does, generally without concern for the consequences. It is a decision for which the residents of the Gulf Coast are now paying with their lives.