Where's Your Vision Thing?

A candidate for a local government office wandered into my office recently, so I asked what I thought was the obvious question: what does she want to accomplish if she gets elected.

She said she had no agenda other than “good government.” She wants to wait until she gets into office, learns the ropes, and sees what is possible before she starts pushing anything.

My response – and I believe this is verbatim – was, “Oh, shit.”

Politicians really do need what George H. W. Bush called, “that vision thing,” a strong sense of what they want to accomplish. Efficiency is not an end in itself. The Nazi death camps were, by most accounts, models of efficiency. In any system where there is a well developed bureaucracy and bad leadership the wrong things get organized and done. In systems without leadership, money and precious resources get wasted feeding systems that do little more than feed themselves, and often harm the people who are paying for it.

Speaking, without portfolio, on behalf of a large number of hard-working, dedicated bureaucrats, I would love to have some people at the top who can tell us where they want to go so we can get moving in that direction. There are a lot of smart, well-qualified, superbly talented public servants in this country who know how organize things and get them done. And a lot of them are frustrated right now because so many people in our society seem to have forgotten that, yes, when it's properly directed, our government really can do great things that can't – or won't – get done otherwise.

Remember what happened when President Kennedy said we're going to the moon within a decade? Dwight Eisenhower said we were going to build a coast-to-coast network of high-speed highways? Franklin Roosevelt said we were going to convert our peacetime industries to produce tanks, airplanes and warships to enter WWII almost overnight? Remember how we built huge dams to generate electricity and wired almost the entire rural U.S.A. within a decade? How we put unemployed veterans and Irish immigrants to work and completed a transcontinental railroad in six years?

Those things got done, not because someone thought about what was possible. They were visions – dreams of the way things should be. Political leaders got behind those dreams, mobilized the country, and armies of bureaucrats organized and engineered the projects and put American industry and the American people to work making those dreams a reality.

Afraid of government boondoggles? At one time or another nearly every major public works project in the country was called a boondoggle. The subway system in Washington finished enormously over budget, the Bay Area Rapid Transit system (BART) was another boondoggle, as was Boston's “Big Dig.” Now try imagining what traffic, and life, would be in any of those areas had someone not had the vision, and the courage to face the technical challenges and virulent criticism.

We're spending too much time standing around complaining that we have too many people out of work and saying we have to tighten our belts, lower our expectations, we can't do anything because we need to save money.

For crying out loud, all of those folks who are out of work have to eat, breath clean air and drink from public water systems. They receive health care, their kids are in school, they use cars and buses that use public roads, highways and bridges. We are already investing a huge amount of money and resources in people who are sitting on the sideline because, as a society, we're too timid to put them to work building the world we want the next generation to live in, and maintaining the infrastructure the last generation built for us.

The marginal cost of doing something with our human resources isn't that great, compared to the tragic waste of talent and the money it takes to keep people idle.

In the political arena, a “can't do” attitude should be unacceptable, and a politician with a “haven't decided where we ought to be going” attitude should give up his or her government health care and go to work for someone who does have a dream.

Every candidate running for office should be able to define good government in a sentence that begins “good government does . . .” rather than “good government is . . .”

Even if the dream is to keep things in your community exactly the way they are, the community's government needs to get organized and do things to see that happens, because there are forces of nature and armies of people hard at work every day trying to change the status quo.

Want to keep things as they are? What's your plan to keep people from building mega-malls on farmland? On the international level, how are you going to keep the number of nuclear powers from growing? How are you going to provide a stable workforce and a stable economy as the digital age, robotics and new communications technologies evolve?

No one should climb up onto a stage unless they want to put on a show. No one should run for office unless they are prepared to lead.