He is a Baptist preacher, so he had the blind faith vote. He is a doctor, so he might have the pill that would save a health care system listed as being in critical condition by almost everybody. He wallpapered the state with the cutest little boy anybody had ever seen and tied the kid to a bus stop on the Information Highway.
He is a little short, but everybody just lowered the podium, so it wasn't a problem. And he had a dedicated, hard-working team.
What he didn't have and doesn't seem to want is a wet blanket, somebody on the team willing to step out of the cheerleading costume and say whoa, somebody with a bridle for the team's unbridled spirit.
Wet blanket is a tough job to have. The salary's not usually good, and benefits are sparse. The people who do it often are reluctant to do it, hanging back until too much damage has been done. There are all kinds of examples. The woman accountant at Enron who said the numbers didn't add up, said it late and maybe too softly to stop the largest corporate scandal in U.S. history.
Richard Nixon had John Dean, but he waited too long to tell the president there was a skeleton in the closet over at the Watergate. Lyndon Johnson's secretary of defense chose to apologize later for the mistakes in Vietnam instead of expressing his doubts during the planning stages of the war. Nobody bucked George Bush on the invasion of Iraq, unless it was done in secrecy. That is possible in what is being shown bit by bit as one of the most secretive administration in modern history.
What we are beginning to realize about the modern trend toward teams is that, while two heads may be better than one and six heads may be better that two, teams can be just as wrong as individuals. And because they are teams, they're a lot harder to stop once they head down the wrong road.
To stay viable, every god needs a devil. And every governor needs a wet blanket, a nay-sayer, a minority viewpoint. The bumper stickers say that the majority rules, but bumper stickers are too short to finish the most important part of that thought: The majority must rule in such a way that no damage or hurt comes to the minority.
Teams don't usually have this follow-up thought, and if they do, it is often discussed in terms of how close can we get to breaking the law without actually breaking it. Can a Baptist get away with dancing if he calls it aerobics? Can a businessman get away with cooking the books by calling the results a simple business failure? How far can a governor go in hiring as political pay-backs and still call it moving the state forward with a go-get-'em team?
Of course, the indictment of the governor is only an accusation. Actual breaking of the law has to be proved in court. The governor pardoned his team as quickly as the accusations were leveled against them. He said then he wouldn't pardon himself, and it's unclear whether or not he could, even if he wanted to. I can't think of an officeholder who has pardoned him or herself. Even Nixon didn't do it.
For those of us out here in the hinterlands, the whole episode is embarrassing, heart-breaking in a way. This governor did go into office with good intentions, and we knew at the time that the road to hell is paved, etc. Still, we crossed our fingers, as we do in every election these days, thinking that stranger things than these promises have happened.
It is hard to look back and pin down exactly when we, as a country, lost the ability to recognize those vague qualities of leadership and decided to turn everything over to teams and their marketing skills. Everyone probably would have a different break point between what someone like Franklin D. Roosevelt had and what Richard Nixon didn't have.
Like everything else, including oil tankers, it takes a long time for big changes to come about. But, if there is a lesson in this one, it is this: If you're going to have a team, you'd better make sure you've got a sinner on the payroll.
As one Idaho spud farmer once told me for quote: “Whatever you say on the outside of that potato sack, you'd better make damn sure you've got every bit of it inside that sack.”
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