Qualifications: Part 2
On senators, singers, and security officials. Or, judging books by their tables of contents.
With Mitt Romney’s last flip, his decision to take himself out of the presidential race, it seems a safe bet that we’ll have a senator in the White House (unless Bloomberg decides to run). Something of a phenomenon, this likely senate coup has people asking why senators, despite running often, haven’t often won their bids for the country’s highest office. A Times piece raises several possibilities — the baggage of voting records, the Washington-insider stigma, the lack of executive experience, the relative comfort of the senate. But, being forever on the lookout for an inherently rational explanation, I wonder whether something about wanting and winning a senate race doesn’t take significantly different qualifications from winning a presidential bid.
The senate is a buffer. The constitution encourages the senate to check the powers of other branches of the Federal Government (e.g., by ratifying presidential appointments).
Rationally then, those who seek a position in the senate (unless they have higher goals —Hillary Clinton, I think, viewed the senate as a stepping stone on her way back to the White House) seek to exert a moderating and deliberative influence. That’s very different from someone who sets his or her sights on leading a state as governor or leading the country as president.
But, as has been demonstrated in the current race, while being a senator doesn’t qualify you as a presidential contender, it doesn’t disqualify you either. Clinton may have ducked through the low gate of the senate on her way to a presidential bid, but voters have decided that senators Obama and McCain have qualifications for more than checking and balancing.
As for disqualifications, Grammy-nominated recording artist, Ledisi, reveals that she had about given up on her career after hearing repeatedly that she didn’t have the right look and the right sound to make it. It’s good to hear that in the music industry creating music that people want to listen to can still qualify one for success. (On a personal note, and if you’ll excuse the shameless plug, I was bouyed up yesterday to learn that nerdlitter, a music blog, selected a song of mine amongst its top thirty for 2007.)
And the story of government official Julie Myers who disciplined an employee for wearing an inappropriate, racially stereotyped costume had me scratching my head. The employee was counseled and forced out on leave while Julie Myers, who posed for a photograph with the man at the party after participating in awarding him the prize for the most creative costume, went on to nomination as a top ranking Homeland Security official. “I was not aware at the time of the contest that the employee disguised his skin color,” Myers wrote.
Either Myers is an idiot or a liar (or both). How she can be qualified to make decisions about immigration and deportation policy defies imagination.
Philosophically speaking, qualifications present an interesting set of concepts. A qualification begins by defining some essential skill or requirement for a given role. This immediately calls upon the concept of “that which is essential.” Very often we get into gray area over the difficulty of defining “essential.” This leads to ad hoc exceptions or exclusions.
Defining essential qualities for a leader, for instance, can be quite tricky. People lead in different ways. And people have many theories about what makes a good leader. Easier perhaps to define those qualities that disqualify a leader — like Myers being an idiot or a liar. But even being found out as a liar might not disqualify someone. Leaders lie all the time to gain strategic advantage. It’s not the lying so much as the “what” and “why” of the lying (as I explored in a post the other day).
And this perhaps brings us to the core difficulty of qualifications. When we define the essential attributes for success in a role, we find that they are necessarily recursive. To be a successful singer, the singer must be able to be successful as a singer. The singer need not necessarily even produce wonderful music (Celine Dione is a case in point).
To borrow from Beckett, ill seen, ill said, this then is the insight: Beware qualifications.
ÂÂ
ÂÂ
Tags: barack-obama, halloween-party, Hillary-Clinton, ill-seen-ill-said, john-mccain, julie-meyers, ledisi, nomination, philosophy, samuel-beckett, senator