John McCain Is A Baby

Barak Obama Can Prioritize

John McCain Can Not

The ability to prioritize is perhaps the most basic and the most important of all management disciplines.  Let me say that again: "disciplines."  Textbooks may call it a "skill" or a "tool", but it's a discipline; and you don't learn how to do it from a textbook.  It's a discipline that you master by achieving goals successfully, with limited resources.  It's the kind of thing community organizers learn to do well.

Tom Brokaw asked McCain and Obama to consider economic reality and the fact that neither of them would be able to fully implement all of their planned initiatives.  He asked them to prioritize.  Obama stood up and said: #1-Energy  #2-Health Care  #3-Education.  It was as though he had thought about it before.  Scary!

McCain reared his head, maundered on for a bit, and finally said there's no reason we can't do everything. That's not a manager's answer.  That's not even a smart politician's answer.  It's a baby's answer.  It ignores economic reality and assumes that nobody else is aware of it either.  It's magical thinking.

I'm not saying that Obama's priorities are correct, that's another argument.  I'm just suggesting that he's a disciplined thinker.  I'd feel good if the president was a disciplined thinker.