Fred LaSor: Hiring a chief executive officer

In back-to-back careers that spanned nearly 50 years I have had the responsibility several times to interview people for a job. Never in all those years has a candidate told me their best qualification for a position was that they were not an evil person, like a former employee was. Never have they told me they wanted to replace an incumbent because s/he was stupid, racist, homophobic, or incompetent.

What they told me is what skills and talents they possessed that qualified them for the job, how they would make the institution better, or what vision they had for its future. Since I was looking for someone who would do best by our organization, that seemed like a good way for job-seekers to convince me to hire them.

The score of Democratic candidates who are currently seeking their party’s nomination for our nation’s top job don’t see it that way. They prefer to demonstrate their readiness to be the leader of the most powerful country in the world by telling us how bad they think the current president is.

If they have a vision, there is little variety: each promises a lot of free stuff. What we know by now is they agree that America should offer free health care to every resident even though the former Democratic president tried to do that and failed. Saying they will “fix Obamacare” is an admission that the so-called Affordable Care Act did not, and does not, work. Remember the opening days of Obamacare and the recurrent web site failures? And things just got worse.

They also agree on the need to institute ever more socialist policies despite the fact socialism has not worked anywhere it has been tried for over a century. From what I have seen in a number of socialist countries where I have been assigned, calling for socialism is really only pretending you’ll take care of people while in fact you increase your hold on power. It is a sham and a lie, and a costly one at that. Its backers say it’s never been tried correctly. You never hear that said about a free market economy.

Another thing Democrats agree on is open borders and unfettered immigration. “It’s a human right,” they say, but the cynical view is that people who have come here illegally will eventually get citizenship and vote Democrat. If Hispanic unemployment were as low under Democrats as it currently is, open immigration might be a winning proposition. Alas, that is not the case.

Democrat candidates agree on other promises: gay marriage is a done deal, even though Obama opposed it when he first ran for office. Late-term abortion is increasingly acceptable, though we were promised not too long ago that it would only be done early in a pregnancy. And a child choosing their own gender is the new “right.”

Identity politics drives their candidacy. When I vote for president I will not be deciding based on the candidate’s skin color, sex or sexual orientation. I would rather vote for the candidate who can keep the economy working and protect our borders. Let us see which Democrat will tell us that is what they want to do.

I don’t have to vote for a candidate of color to prove I’m not racist, or a woman to prove I’m not sexist, or a homosexual to prove I’m not homophobic. I know my hands are clean on those counts, and anyway, my vote is private. I will not use it to virtue signal – I will use it to support the most qualified person of either party, for the future of the nation.

Fred LaSor has followed elections in the USA, Europe and Africa with great interest. 2020 is shaping up to be a hard-fought election in the USA.