The Mae West President

The Mae West Presidency at Donald Sensing's blog

I think what we are witnessing is a combination of two factors:

• A Mae West personality coupled with,
• The return of the Peter Principle

We have here a Mae West presidency, which I illustrate with two quotes of the platinum blondeshell:

1. It's better to be looked over than overlooked.

2. There's no such thing as bad publicity.


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At one's level of incompetence, the manager or leader occupies his time with tasks below the level necessary for the office and hopes that staffs can pull success's rabbit out of the hat. (This helps explains why Obama has so many czars.) Couple that with Obama's inherent inability to measure success by any standard other than getting personal attention from as broad a swath as possible, and you see that the Oval office is occupied by a weak, ineffectual leader unable to perform at the level required.

As others have exhaustively pointed out, there is nothing at all in Obama's resume that shows he ever made highly difficult decisions that depended, at the end, on his own personal reservoir of wisdom and experience. So he does not tackle the inbox because its contents are above his competence. (One is reminded of Obama telling Rick Warren that when an unborn child gets human rights is "above my pay grade.") He tends instead to lesser matters that match his lower level of competence and gratifyingly feed the ego. And so he flies to Copenhagen to deliver a speech of no significance on a matter of no consequence. Why? Because he can do that - simply standing in front of a crowd reading eloquently from a teleprompter he can handle quite well.

And it gets him front and center in the international media. It's a twofer.