Advisors

Presidents, and presidential candidates, do not really act by themselves. They have a team of advisors and chiefs of staff who help shape the president’s or candidate’s actions, propose strategies, filter information, control access, etc, etc.  While the president or candidate themselves certainly sets the overall policies and tone, the quality of the staff controls how successful the execution is and how well and accurately informed the president or candidate is. In truth a presidential campaign is as much a test of how good a candidate’s staff is as it is how good the candidate themselves are.

It is interesting that Trump appears to have won the primaries with no staff helping him.  Of course, there may have been help under the radar, but then for the primary race all he had to do (apparently) was be the best persuader in the crowd, and he didn’t need any help doing that. Now that he is moving into the general election phase, I see that he is doing exactly what he does in his business enterprises – go out and pay top dollar to hire the very best people available to run things.  And I assume that is what he would do if elected president.

Clinton, as near as I can tell, is repeating her 2008 error – choosing her staff for personal loyalty to her rather than competence.  In 2008 party leaders urged her repeatedly to replace key members of her staff who simply weren’t getting the job done, but she refused. And she lost!  Much of that staff followed her to her Secretary of State job, and were again incompetent. No competent staff would have let her get into her current e-mail security problem with the FBI.

She appears to be repeating the error yet again. Her messages are muddled. Trump is about “Making America Great Again”.  Can you tell what Clinton’s core message is about? (Perhaps “Elect me because I am a woman”?).  Look at her website homepage – it actually mentions Trump and Love together, amidst a confusing clutter of images. A recent twitter posting from her went viral when someone (whoever composed the Twitter posting – Clinton apparently doesn’t know how) got mixed up and put a statement supporting Trump into the message.  These are really stupid errors that no competent team would have made.

And there is the rub.  I assume if she were elected president she would continue to put personal loyalty to her above competence in her advisors – and that would be disastrous.

Neither of the choices is appealing in this campaign, but on balance I think I’d rather vote for a president who values competence in their team over personal loyalty to themselves.