Hinckley: Dear Sir, You Are Embarrassing Us…
Thursday, May 18, 2017
America has deep systemic, financial, structural, and social problems. We all know it. Problems that have largely been created over decades by career politicians, from both sides of the aisle, who primarily care about two things, re-election and climbing the power ladder of their respective parties. At the federal level, incumbent politicians are largely actors (save a few) in a two party play who pit we Americans against each other, with red meat issues, driving money into their campaign coffers, which combined with the power, purse and staff of the federal government, make re-election about a 95% probability.
In fact, the only way one can rationalize a system where on a good day, the combined houses of congress struggle to maintain a 14% approval rating, yet we send roughly 95% of them back to office (according to Politifact), is that they have the system rigged. My first hand experience can confirm this.
The division seems to be fairly clear, the left is the champion of Big Government taking from the private sector with the aim of lifting the “middle class” through government programs, while the right is the champion of the private sector fulfilling the “American Dream” through increased opportunity and work, thus strengthening families and our nation. You all know where I stand on these issues and we can debate them in coming articles, but today we are going to talk about a blown opportunity.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTSo along comes an outsider, a guy who doesn’t spend all his time begging for money and largely funds his own campaign, he’s his own guy, the anti-Politician, the anti-Washington. This guy is filling stadiums in blue state Massachusetts with comments like “let’s drain the swamp”…and the fans go wild. This is BIG! A true movement not baked and served up by the two-party duopoly. Warts and all, after saying and doing some of the most hideous things ever on a campaign trail, we held our noses and backed this out-sider, because we were sick of getting lied to by insiders. America was voting for the “real” private sector after years of big-government, a soaring national debt and an economy where crony capitalism (big-business) and Wall Street were killing it, while Main Street and the “fly-over” states were left rotting in the rear-view mirror. The excitement for a “non-career” politician, the profile our founding fathers espoused, of “citizen legislator “was palpable. We’d hired a CEO to fix our problems.
And then it started to unravel in front of our eyes. The difference between a great CEO (Steve Jobs) and a horrible CEO (“chain saw” Al Dunlap) began to unfold on the world stage.
Steve Jobs and many other great CEO’s are known to have said that the secret to building a great company or organization is hiring people smarter than you, listening to them and then letting them do their job. Bad CEO’s act like dictators, hire yes-men to surround them and can’t take constructive criticism or feedback. They are men ruled by their ego rather than their sense of humility. Sadly, we have hired the latter. Instead of seizing the opportunity to fix the many things from our deeply failing government schools, to our national debt and trade imbalance, we are witnessing a man with the temperament of a 13-year-old boy have a daily temper tantrum on Twitter with the recurring theme of “mom-she started it!”
Mr. President, your entire message, our message, of reforming government, fixing broken entitlement systems, rebuilding America and making it great again by getting people back to work and off the system is lost in your knee jerk decisions, petty behavior, constant self aggrandizement and historical fiction. I’m sad to say, it’s really that bad and you are unraveling in front of the entire world. You ignored the number one rule in politics and picked a fight with “people who buy ink by the barrel”…and they are winning. Do us all a favor and pull it together, the way it stands now, it looks like you just aren’t cut out for the job and don’t have the self- control or temperament to be President of the United States, it’s that obvious. Not only are you making us all look really bad, you are wasting a precious opportunity to do the work we sent you there to do. It’s not about you Donald, it’s about making America great again and that’s clearly the point you are missing.
Former U.S. Senate candidate Barry Hinckley is an entrepreneur, most recently founding the party app Yotme and Bullhorn, Inc. before that. Bullhorn was sold in 2012 to Vista Equity Partners. Hinckley, a free market libertarian, lives in Newport.
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