Prepared to Lead

Ronald Reagan had run a labor union, the Screen Actors Guild, and had the executive experience of being governor of the most populace American state of California when he sought the US presidency. John McCain had been a combat veteran, a high-ranking military officer, decorated for bravery, a prisoner of war, and Arizona's multi-term US Senator when he declared for the highest office. There would have been little question that he was job-ready on day one of the presidency had his campaign succeeded. Barack Hussein Obama had brief experience in the Illinois House of Representatives where he had a pattern of missing or merely voting present on controversial issues with the glaring exception of voting to deny care to babies who had survived attempted abortions. Obama felt himself well-prepared and fully-equipped to lead after little more than one hundred and fifty days serving in the US Senate and offered himself for the White House. Some who opposed Obama thought with a multi-front war and the threat of terror, that the stakes were simply too high to trust a novice who might need on the job training, but the old-line media hardly questioned Obama's experience or readiness to serve and enough of the voting public was unconcerned, that in the election, doubts were cast aside sufficiently for Obama to prevail. In almost three hundred days in office, when it comes to the tough call, not taking out Somali pirates holding a US captain that any President would have done, but conducting the war in Afghanistan toward victory, Obama seems unable to act, suffering from the paralysis of analysis (and this is a generous assessment- some might say gross incompetence, gross negligence toward our troops and their families, or the cowardice of a lack of backbone in leadership). Whatever the case may be, clearly Obama was not fully prepared to lead from day one.