The Obama Administration: A Raging Firestorm of Overqualified Incompetence and No Experienced Firefighters

In the early days of the Obama Administration, Kathleen Reardon, Professor USC Marshall School of Business, wants to know what happened to foresight and common sense.

After commenting on the finger-pointing during the bailout bonus uproar in congress this week, Reardon writes:

And let's look for a moment at our new president. He might take a lesson or two from all of this even if his popularity remains high. He shouldn't be wasting political chits. As a Harvard graduate, he has come to believe, despite his concern and compassion for average people, that the best answers come from members of the "club." But big shots do indeed put their pants on one leg at a time just like the rest of us. Many of them are stellar in their particular areas, but not impressive when it comes to seeing the bigger picture. Few have had to balance checkbooks from the age of sixteen, but have instead learned about economics from books rather than reality. Their understanding of people is wanting. President Obama would be better served with some people experts on his team -- psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, communication experts, political scientists and others who know what people do and how they spend under stress -- not what they're supposed to do based on some abstract formula on a white board.

Change means finding people who have foresight and common sense uncommonly found among the "indispensable". It means not calling in the people who created the problem to fix it.

When your stove is on fire, having a conflagration expert around to discuss the likelihood of spread is interesting, but give me a down-to-earth, experienced firefighter any day. Now there's the indispensable guy!

Reardon continues:

That's what we have -- a raging firestorm of overqualified incompetence and no experienced firefighters around. We have a plethora of wealthy big shots intending to stay that way. They owe a lot of people and they've paid off many of them at our expense. It's time for all this disingenuous finger pointing to end. No more yelling at each other and deflecting blame. No more "the buck stops here" to cover the many places it stopped on the way up

Forget about hiring anymore of the pedigreed "indispensable" types. Let's get some smart, big picture people for whom foresight and common sense are not, at best, soft science. And let's stop looking for someone to hang so all the other bandits can go free, and, most important, let's get on with saving the country.

We can only hope our neophyte president will soon realize his administration has gotten away from him.