No Runny Eggs

It’s a common misunderstanding to believe that the terms “Manager” and “Leader” are interchangeable.   This is especially true in business settings where it is common to refer to the “Manager” of a group as the “Leader” of that group.

Of course to understand “Manager” one must understand “manage.”   A  dictionary definition of “Manage” is:

to handle, direct, govern, or control in action or use.

Which supports this common definition of “Manager”

a person who controls and manipulates resources and expenditures

And while that looks similar to the dictionary definition of “Leader”:

a guiding or directing head, as of an army, movement, or political group.

There are significant differences. To say it another way, Managers can be Leaders but not all Managers are Leaders. To take it one step further, some Leaders are not Managers at all. Peter Drucker, one of the foremost experts on organizational management and leadership describes them best as:

leadership is doing the right things; management is doing things right.

After the personalities, the policies and ideologies, this Presidential election comes down to a simple choice: Do we want a Manager or a Leader?

Let’s look at how the candidates have handled just 4 quick examples.

The Surge:
This has been well documented so there is no need to cover old ground here. Relevant to our Manager and Leader discussion, the Iraq war had less than 50% public support when John McCain outlined the strategy for the Surge. Even amongst Republicans, support for the war in Iraq was under 50%. The safe, politically expedient approach for McCain, the Maverick, would have been to blame Bush and Rumsfeld for the abysmal handling of the war and support a withdrawal. McCain could have done that but didn’t because he didn’t believe it was the right thing to do.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, never missed an opportunity to side with his party and the popular sentiment for exiting the war. Obama joined other Democrats in attempting to withhold funding and supplies from troops to force the withdrawal.

Russian Invasion of Georgia:

In April, 2008, several months before Russia invaded Georgia, John McCain was quoted by Rueters as saying:

We must not allow Russia to believe it has a free hand to engage in policies that undermine Georgian sovereignty….
and
Unfortunately, Russia’s leaders have chosen a course of confrontation rather than cooperation.

Even with that “Heads up,” Barack Obama’s initial response to the Russian invasion was tepid at best. Even “The Politico,” a blog that is certainly not right leaning said about the responses from the two candidates:

Obama’s statement put him in line with the White House, the European Union, NATO and a series of European powers, while McCain’s initial statement "” which he delivered in Iowa and ran on a blog on his Web site under the title "McCain Statement on Russian Invasion of Georgia" "” put him more closely in line with the moral clarity and American exceptionalism projected by President Bush’s first term.

While McCain’s position did not change, Barack Obama, after two or three additional tries at it, finally came to condemning Russia in words that were very similar to McCain’s first and only position.
Freddie Mae/Fannie Mac regulation:

Hotair  did a great job of showing how in 2005, John McCain anticipated the problems with Freddie Mae and Fannie Mac.   He authored legislation that would have removed oversight for those entities from HUD and set up a new agency enabled with much broader and stringent authority to oversee Mae and Mac.   Would the legislation have prevented the current problems?   Hard to say.   The point is that McCain saw the issues and attempted to address them while Barack Obama worked towards becoming the second largest recipient of donations from the two entities.

Let me add a bit of an aside for those of you who will be carrying on about McCain adding regulation and that being anti Conservative. You’re wrong in this sense: Even though they pretended to be, Freddie and Fannie were never  truely publicly traded  entities, they were governmental entities. There was always an understanding that their debt was backed by the full faith and credit of the United States Government. Because of this, they were perceived as having less risk and this allowed mortgage rates to be lower. This also caused investors in the mortgage backed securities (the cause of our credit crisis) to be perceived as having significantly less risk than they should have and thus were leveraged up far more than a normal security would have been. My point is that if we have governmental agencies acting in the public markets they should be highly scrutinized and watched over. If they aren’t, they have undue advantage in the market place and, in the case of Freddie and Fannie, can influence or monopolize a market to the point of dictating all actions and behaviors in that market.

Current Economic Challenges:

As I wrote about here, Barack Obama had promised that he would provide a plan to navigate the current financial crisis. However on Friday, he followed up with “Just kidding!”

John McCain, on the other hand, while not agreeing with the FEDs actions, issued his own proposal for addressing the financial problems. You can read the details here.

Barack Obama has competed head to head with John McCain on at least 4 different “3 AM calls.” Two of them have been within the past 60 days. In each case, Barack Obama has either made the wrong call or made no call at all. While impossible to say whether McCain has made the exact right call each time it’s clear that where unresolved, his instincts have been right.

We have a choice, someone who does the right things, a leader, or someone who tries, but doesn’t often do things right.