The Nail In The Coffin of Leadership

“I am neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet,” as frequent show guest Yonni often says, but this morning I feel very prophetic.  Let us turn the wayback machine to the highly destructive Los Angeles wildfires of January 2025…

At the time, as the fires burned, I wrote:

…LA has to really be considered as a region.  And that is where the dissembling will begin.  The problems that created this catastrophe are regional, but with no single regional authority, and each of the smaller partial authorities able to point the finger at someone else, any effort to fix this is likely to end up as a colorful phrase once uttered by Clint Eastwood.

Over the weekend just past a report was released:

 A new report commissioned by Gov. Gavin Newsom concludes that no single decision or mistake caused the devastation that Los Angeles County experienced during the January 2025 wildfires, but rather a series of failures across multiple agencies and systems.

It is pathetic that the Governor of the state had to commission (read pay a bunch of money to) U.L. Research Institutes to compile 700 pages of of stuff in order to conclude something that I – and pretty much anyone else that has had to deal with government in the region – knew as the fires burned.  It is pathetic that the report addresses only the immediate response to the fires and fails altogether to address the conditions that lead to the fires or the complete failure to rebuild in a timely fashion.  It is pathetic that the same governor that saw fit to order the closure of churches during the pandemic deems himself so powerless in this circumstance that all he can do is order a study.  It is terrifying that Newsom is considered a leading Democratic candidate for the presidency on 2028.

Leadership is dead, long live politics.

Notice that I briefly juxtaposed pandemic Newsom – take charge, fire off orders, move people to action – to wildfire Newsom – hide in the corner, let the local agencies fail and then come in later and act like he has everything figured out.  (Yet not a solution to the commission studied failures in sight.)  But I do not want to pick on Gavin Newsom too much here, he is indicative of a trend, it is not like he invented this garbage.

Somewhere in this polarized, media-saturated age leadership has died and been replaced by pandering.  Trump, who is doing and accomplishing many necessary and good things, is not leading – he is simply acting and telling those opposed to go pound sand.  The Biden administration could not lead because Biden was absent, and the things that they did were simply failures.  (The Afghanistan withdrawal may be the greatest failure in presidential history.)

In Texas, James Talarico is running by setting up, and pretending to knock down, a straw man.  It is not that “Christian nationalism” is not a real thing – it is just that it does not matter.  The movement is just not big enough to make a significant difference.  Talarico is not trying to lead Texas to a better place, he just wants to get elected.

Leadership tries to pull people together and lead them forward.  Our politics these days are based on dividing people and setting them at each others throats.  Then trying to make your side just a bit bigger than the other.

It is pathetic.