[caption id=”attachment_100183″ align=”aligncenter” width=”2712″] AP Photo/Lionel Cironneau
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Let’s say you were chosen to be the country’s most prominent music producer, and you’ve been on the job for almost five full years. The time to ‘learn on the job’ has come and gone, no?
Eli Lake has a post up today on how President Obama and his cultural nemesis, Kayne West, could complement each other — the president as a superb rap artist but a third-rate producer, and West as a much better producer than he is a rapper. From Lake:
If Barack Obama was in the hip hop business, he’d be a rapper. His speeches inspire, his rhetoric soars and he exudes charisma. Obama however would not be a producer, a job that requires the skill to manage the egos of artists and pay attention to the details that can turn a rapper’s lyrical vision into a downloadable single. DJ Premier or Pete Rock would have never allowed the Obamacare website to be unveiled before the bugs were worked out.
This is where Kanye comes into the picture. While Kanye is a rapper today, he made his mark at first as Jay Z’s producer. Even though Kanye has sold millions of records, his lyrics never seem as natural or spell binding as many others in the game.*
The point: West is a magician behind the scenes, and if he and the president were to ever appear on an episode of “Iconoclasts,” West could draw upon his particular skills to “teach Obama how to better manage a project and [see] it through despite the opposition of those wishing him to fail,” Lake writes.
Perhaps unintentionally, this reinforces two related lessons of the Obama administration that the nation would be wise to remember in future elections: One, the presidency is not a job for someone who simply can orate really well, and two, being a chief executive doesn’t lend itself much to ‘learning as you go.’
Republicans have hammered the first point from the first days of the Obama era. Rhetorical talent is a key attribute of any president — his words carry unmatched influence — but it is not a sole qualification for the gig. The person who speaks and spins politics in public without having to manage the policies he’s defending is called the press secretary, not the president. “President” is not synonymous with Orator in Chief: a charismatic someone whose “speeches inspire” and “rhetoric soars.” Our nation’s history is full of inspiring individuals whose words, written or spoken, have taken root outside the Oval Office: Gouverneur Morris, a Founding Father, prominent abolitionist and “penman of the Constitution;” Sens. Daniel Webster and Robert Hayne, who staged the best true ‘debate’ in the history of the Senate; MLK, and on and on.
Terrific lyricists and ‘rappers,’ all of them — and not one of them a producer.
The presidency is a job for a producer; an expert one. That’s largely why President Obama has declined in popularity and effectiveness with the passing years of his administration, and it’s a reminder of why presidents don’t have endless time to ride with training wheels. Sure, the principal learns on the job every day — he has to, as the job makes the man, and the man doesn’t make the job — but lack of management skill is an unacceptable deficiency, especially after re-election. This president has had nearly five years to show himself as a competent executive and has failed. The nation’s healthcare system is in terrible upheaval, the executive branch is marred by scandal, and there’s an evident lack of control behind all of it. Now is not the time to place a phone call to Kanye for advice.
Campaigning and public speaking are for artists. Governing is for producers.
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* Debatable — Kanye can write egomania instead of lyrics, but he can also pen “Too many Urkels on your team / That’s why you’re Winslow” and pretty much all of “All Falls Down” — but the metaphor is clear.
