Job Security

by Dennis Green

I pointed out to an old friend the other day, who had joyfully sent me notice that Obama would be hauled into court to prove his citizenship, (a claim that later turned out to be bogus), that, “Apparently, you nutty Birthers would rather have Joe Biden as president. Not me.”

He soon recanted.

And it’s often said that the best job security, if not life insurance, for any president is having in place a Vice President about whom the general opinion is so low that the thought of that person ascending to the throne is unthinkable. George W. Bush had Cheney, and there was not one attempt on his life, and very little talk of impeachment.

Ronald Reagan had Spiro Agnew as his V.P. until the man had to resign in disgrace because of a scandal back home from the time he was governor of Maryland. JFK had Lyndon Johnson, and one unintended consequence of the actions of Lee Harvey Oswald was a massive Civil Rights Program, and escalation of the War in Vietnam.

That may have been a part of the thinking behind the choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate for John McCain. The thought that he is a cancer survivor was scary enough, let alone any attempt to impeach or assassinate the man, leaving her in his place. And she is proving herself a quick study, being able to name, on the Beck show on Fox the other day, George Washington as one of our Founding Fathers.

Gee, did he sign the Bill of Rights? Or was that some other guy? Even Beck was unimpressed. Of course, as the Dumbing Down of America proceeds, most people, who hated their civics class, actually find such ignorance appealing.

The example of job security that puzzles me the most, and gets in the way of the Smarting Up of America, I believe, is job security for teachers, aka, tenure.

Tenure was originally intended to protect freedom of thought in the classroom, to buffer those daring teachers who might criticize someone like Sarah Palin from PTA torment. But now it functions much more often to prevent incompetent teachers, the burnouts who sleep walk and phone it in, from being fired for just cause.

The other instance of job security I find troubling is that enjoyed by our Congressional members. The long-time hacks in both parties are in evidence almost every day, by their comments, by their votes, by the special interests who lobby them successfully. From my own state, Feinstein, Boxer and Pelosi come to mind, but from the other side of the aisle, hacks of equal stature such as Mitch McConnell and John McCain make fools of themselves every other day.

And I’m not sure that term limits is the answer, for in California, it’s just resulting in a shifting of the deck chairs on the deck of the Titanic as over-hiring and overspending takes the budget straight to Hell. The hacks, termed out, just run for mayor somewhere.

I’d say a stricter code of ethics is in order, but that’s nowhere in evidence elsewhere in our society — not in banking, obviously, nor education, not in the military or the CIA, nor in our public utilities — so why burden politicians with an unfair disadvantage?

When I was a partner in an ad agency, I was told repeatedly that we were the only folks who had never cheated our clients, with overbilling or inflated markups and commissions, and that earned us a lot of respect, but lost a lot of short-term profiteering as well.

So I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t value job security, never have, but I suppose, being “gainfully unemployed,” I have it now.

©2010 Dennis Green