The Administration of "Hard Work"

How many times have you heard this from the current administration? (and to be fair this has been part of past administrations as well) "We are working day and night.....I will not rest until....we are working around the clock...." I have heard it a lot in the past 5 years. In fact, every time something goes haywire in the Obama administration, we can be sure that we will soon hear Obama telling us how hard he and everyone in his administration are working.

I worked with a systems engineer early in my career. She was brilliant, personable, and effective. In the years I had the privilege of working with her, I am not sure if she ever worked a 40 hour week. I can tell you with certainty that she never worked a 50 or 60 hour week. Guess what? I couldn't have cared less. Our customers loved her, she never missed a deadline, and she ran projects like a finely tuned swiss watch. There was nothing asked of her that she did not deliver in spades. Did it matter to me that she could get all of this done in 30 hours a week, making time for her tennis team or playing the piano? Nope. As many good executives have noted, we should never confuse hard work with results. We all appreciate hard work, but we expect and reward results, no matter how much or how little time it takes to deliver them.

President Obama's lack of private sector experience is no more evident in his value of "working hard" over results. I couldn't care less how hard anyone in the administration was working while the Obamacare systems crashed and burned. I'd have traded some of that hard work for good results any day. Obama told us how hard he and his administration have been working on 1) the economy 2) winning the war on man-made disasters caused by...well, we aren't allowed to say 3) the budget shortfalls, etc. The problem is, the results in all of these areas suck. They are terrible.

If anyone in the private sector worked hard on these problems and delivered the results of this administration, they would have been fired. I would feel better if they told me that they stayed out all night drinking and playing cards. At least there would be an excuse for such bad results and I wouldn't feel so bad firing them - and at least they had fun while delivering bad results. The problem with government is that no one gets fired. Ever, no matter how bad the results. All that matters is that they are working hard....outcomes be damned.

Opportunity Missed

Some enterprising young journalists are missing the opportunity of a lifetime. I think the standard for modern journalistic excellence and social relevance is the work of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Their initial work investigating a break-in at DNC headquarters uncovered corruption and a massive cover-up that led to the downfall of an American president. This was journalistic gold. It made the careers of two relatively unknown writers.

It is odd to me that no journalist today realizes that the current IRS scandal is a career, riches, and fame waiting to happen for someone willing to look hard enough and ask the right questions. A simple timeline of known events and admissions certainly rises to the initial scandal that held the national and world media for years as the trail of the Watergate scandal led higher and higher. We know that IRS singled out and targeted organizations based solely on their political views that ran contrary to the Obama administration. This is government overreach at its worst. It violates everything we expect from our government and runs counter to everything intended by the founders in the constitution. We know that the IRS exposed this activity by planting a question in a press conference. We know that the person who ran the unit responsible for tax exempt organizations stated that she had done nothing wrong, before pleading the 5th before congress....twice. We know that emails of Louis Lerner are either lost or not lost or that they exist in backup files that DoJ insists are to difficult to find. We know that laws were broken if emails were not backed up and archived. We know that Louis Lerner's blackberry was wiped clean right after congressional hearings began. We know that the head of the IRS visited the White House many times in the run up to the 2012 elections. Can you believe no one sees the abject corruption and disregard for the law in these facts or is at least curious enough to look for the truth about who knew what and when. One thing is certian, Louis Lerner's emails are damning of someone in the IRS or the administration, otherwise we would not have seen the biggest display of organized obfuscation and obstruction since the Nixon administration.

 This is the biggest opportunity in the journalism field since Watergate. Yet the media, outside of Fox News, sits on its hands. Maybe they are too vested in Obama. Maybe they know this could lead to the White House and don't want to know what really happened. Maybe they agree with Louis Lerner and detest Tea Party and Patriot groups. It is either odd, sad, or disheartening that the media is giving our government a pass on this massive scandal.

The problem with all of this is that the media has an important role in the recipe for our republic. When they are too lazy to look into obvious and rampant corruption or too timid to look into government over reach or so ideologically aligned with an administration, we are all in trouble. I detest hypotheticals, but....can you imagine the media frenzy if this had happened under the Bush or Reagan administrations? Yeah, pretty sure we'd be at the bottom of this already.