All I want for Christmas is a real leader in the White House

Talk this week was of an earlier-than-expected South Carolina primary election, which might cause Iowa to move their caucus into December. It's a silly contest to see who will be first, since it doesn't matter to the outcome. The incentive will be for the candidate who expects to come in second in Iowa, to drop out of that race and focus on February 5, when a lot more votes are at stake. Just ask Rudy Giuliani, who sat out the Republican Iowa straw poll this week since his time is better spent elsewhere.

But the silly controversy did get me thinking about a serious subject, which is what I want for Christmas this year. Yesterday's Douglas County parade, and today's Perspective section of the Denver Post, are helping me to answer that question: all I want for Christmas is a real leader in the White House.

Today's Post contains a half-finished article by John McQuaid of the Open Society Institute, a George Soros organization dedicated to supporting democracy around the world. It's a worthwhile goal, but what a disappointing article and a missed opportunity. McQuaid bemoans the incompetence of American government, the inability to deal with deteriorated infrastructure, hurricanes, and Islamic fundamentalism. He says government failure and American loss of self-confidence are a result of an actively anti-government agenda of the Bush administration and the anti-government ideology of libertarians and corporatists. He states that "big government has failed," and in his final paragraph says someone should do something about it, though he doesn't say who or what.

I think McQuaid has put his finger on part of the problem, but the reason he doesn't have a solution is that he has the cause-and-effect relationship backwards. American lack of self-confidence is the cause of government ineffectiveness, and is also the cause of a lot of other problems such as loss of competitive advantage in the world economy, and having the foreign policy of a wife-beater. In order to solve McQuaid's problem with ineffective government, we have to look at why we've lost our confidence, and what to do about that.

In yesterday's Douglas County Parade, the Republican party entry consisted of a big red Hummer, apparently the GOP's symbol of American and Republican dominance. A few positions later in the parade lineup was the Democratic entry, four hybrid cars made by Toyota and Honda. In actual usage by typical Douglas County households, the hummer and the hybrids are used for exactly the same purposes and carry exactly the same cargo — commuters, kids, and groceries. The Democratic entry of four vehicles used less gas and produced less pollution than the GOP entry of one vehicle. The four hybrids can serve four times as many families as the one Hummer, and so in practice carries four times as much cargo for less fuel.

There is no good reason why American car companies can't produce efficient cars and make a good profit doing it. Our engineers are just as good as Japan's; many of their engineers were trained in our universities, and we could even buy their engineers and technology if we had to. There's nothing in our free market system that is any worse than Japan's. Our taxes are lower than theirs, too, so it has nothing to do with "big government".

The reason we can't beat Japan in the manufacture of automobiles, is we don't want to. It's a cultural problem, that doesn't start with government, it starts with us. We could give a huge boost to the profitability and competitiveness of American businesses overnight, if we wanted to, by taking health care off the books of US corporations through universal health care. But we don't have the stomach to do it. We could make ourselves safe from radical Islamic terrorism in very short order by engaging Islamic leaders and treating them with some respect, making them partners. But we're afraid to elect leaders who have the skills and will to do it.

We don't need a president who's an ideologue or technocrat, who wants to focus on making government smaller or better. We certainly don't need a president, of either party, who will scare us into submission. What we need is a president who is a cultural leader. Government is an important part of the solution, but a much bigger contribution needs to come from individuals and businesses. We're ready for a leader who will challenge us and support us to accomplish great things, who will inspire us to find our self-confidence to take on big goals and carry them out as a society. That's what I want for Christmas.