"And you know what? One of the things about being president is you get better as time goes on," he added.
I suspect this will be his theme for many of his campaign speeches.
And his base will buy it.
One of my big pet peeves is this idea of "on the job training" for people in positions of leadership/responsibility. I saw this in action in college.
In college I was elected as president of a campus-wide organization. I'd been very active in it for two years and was pretty familiar with how it was run and its purpose, etc. Even so before the first meeting I chaired I read the national organization's bylaws, the mission statement, Robert's Rules of Order (we conducted every meeting with RRO), etc. If I do say so myself we had a successful time under my leadership--we doubled membership and attendence (which had never happened before), we had the largest number of attendees at the national conference, we were more visible in campus-wide activities, etc.
The next person to follow me in the position was a woman who had definite ideas of what she saw as the organization's purpose. She chucked all we'd accomplished and pursued her agenda. BUT she didn't know what she was doing. At her first meeting as chair she didn't even know how to open the meeting and failed to provide an agenda for the meeting. She kept looking to the attendees and asking and "what do we do next?". I walked out after about 20 minutes and a close friend came after me.
I was very upset and she said, "Give her a chance to learn what to do."
I said she should have already known.
I gave her a chance but she never did any better. And by the end of her term the organization was worse off than when I took over. (I've seen this play out over and over in the many organizations I've been a part of since--the idea if we just "hope" for the best and be patient it will happen).
Which also lead me to conclude "women are stupid".
Anyway, my point is BO's observations are a big red flag for me. He's basically, admitting he went into the job as a doofus.
Also, do you know of any president who had a better second term than his first? Not even George Washington was so lucky.
