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Ok, thats the last time I do that.

I finished reading "Fugitive Days", "Dreams From My father" and "The Audacity Of Hope".

The problem with reading crap like that is you can't un-read it. Its like looking at crime scene photos, watching LBJ lift up his shirt to show you his scars or accidentally finding your grandmothers teeth in the bottom of the glass you just drank out of. You did it, but now you got to deal with the thought of it for the rest of your life as the little images rattle around in your head from time to time.

I wont go into detail tonight but I have discovered the one thing I deeply dislike and distrust about Barack Obama. Its something I think completely disqualifies him to be President.

(You Star Trek Geeks will get this one) What I dont like about Barack Obama is that he's never faced failure. He's never passed the "Kobyashi Maru" test at the Academy. He's simply trying to hard to be liked. I dont trust a man who hasnt absolutely blown it once in his life. You ask a man "whats your biggest mistake?", you better see him immediately look at his feet and then look away for a moment while he decides if he should trust you or not, else you've got a liar on your hands. You've either got a liar, or you've got a man who doesnt entirely trust you either. This is not a good place to start a relationship as intense as the one he's asking us to take part in.

"Whats your biggest failure" is actually a question I ask all my potential hires. If they start giving me some half assed ear candy about failure teaching them everything and it was a great experience, they usually get the door. If they stop and get real humble, if they start to get that face that only comes from experience and if they can tell me how it changed them, they get to continue.

Nowhere in either book or Ayers' book do I get any sense of failure. Loss? yeah, lots of loss, regrets? yeah but not in the way you would think. The word "Pentinent" comes to mind for both men and "they aint it" as my Dad would've said. I'm struck by Obamas non answer to that question in the first debates. It would not have passed my test in a job interview. Obama simply leaped out with the answer as if he was a student too eager to please the teacher. John McCain changed the pitch in his voice and looked down. McCain faced failure. Obama has no idea what I'm talking about, no man who has ever failed leaps out at that question anymore than "one-armed lion tamers" are anxious to get back into the cage with the lions.

To Obama, "Failure" is an interpretation, a grade to be made in class. With McCain, its the bitter taste of bile and the acrid smell of self doubt that lingers over a lifetime. Its that ghostly thought that crosses your mind at 2:00 AM and causes you to sit upright at the end of the bed.

To Obama, Failure is a judgement that you pass onto others, its meaningless and its not a threshold he's crossed in his life, he's been swaddled in words of soft praise throught his life and protected from any harm by those who love him. Frankly, its made him soft and malleable, like super putty. You put him on any image and he becomes a facsimile of that image and you can stretch it to any dimension you like. To McCain, failure is the beating the anvil takes to make soft metal into hard iron. You can bang on it all day long, it only tempers the Iron, it wont suddenly transform into Bamboo because its the fashionable thing to do.

To be honest, only one person out of ten actually passes that test in my interviews. Most people are just simply as full of crap as a Christmas goose and would do anything in the world for you in an interview, except of course, confess it all to you about how "way back when", they totally and completely screwed up. People will try to dress it up into something more than it was or minimize it into less or place the blame someone else or even parade out some fashionable illness to allow them to take the role of victim in the story. But try as they might, no one can quite get the blood out of carpet of their soul. The stain is there, you either make it part of the scenery and you learn to tell a great story about it or you buy a really big potted plant to cover it and hope no one notices.

But you know that you will have this thought rattling around in your mind making noise on your soul like that of a single marble running loose in the bottom of a 55 gallon metal trashcan; that everyone will know why it is that you have a potted palm tree right there in the center of your living room. The harder you try to hide it and the stain just becomes all the more obvious.

So when someone at a job interview asks you the equivalent of "Say buddy,whats with the big potted plant - you tryin to hide something?", try to remember that confession is good for the soul. And for job interviews?, its not so bad either. Just dont make a habit of it. One potted palm shows you are human, two or more shows you have a complusion.

(I will be in the shower with a large container of Comet cleanser and a wire brush for the next 24 hours trying to get the stink of these three books off me.)

Posted @ October 20, 2008 10:56 PM | Current Affairs

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