I went out yesterday afternoon to vote for the next President of the United States, the first time I’ve had confidence that I was casting my ballot for the winner in quite awhile.  I’ve voted for the winner before, but the races were much tighter then.

I parked down the road from the library/polling station, this after passing dozens of cars littering the side of the road.  I went armed with supplies for the wait:  iPod, iPhone, Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, Business Week, and my Bose headphones.  2.5-3 hours was the estimate when I got to the library as the line of a couple hundred folks snaked around the building.  Expectations are a big part of dealing with a wait time like this.  Disney figured that out years ago at DisneyWorld, adding TV screens to entertain while giving wait times at different points of the queue.

I kept busy bouncing from Twitter and taking pictures with my iPhone, the background music shifting from John Legend’s new “Evolver,” Missy HIggins, Hillsong United, then finishing with the “World Soccer Daily” Podcast.  I’d used a tool on the AJC to look through the different races and their responses to questions posed by the League of Women Voters.  That and an occasional further visit to candidate websites gave me my list of individuals to vote for the Commissioner of this and the Sherriff and whatnot.

Every four years, we Americans vow how we’re now going to get involved in making a difference in America, in politics, etc.  As I used the touch screen to vote, I felt pretty depressed that I’d done so little to decide who I was voting for in all these races.  This is Democracy?  Most voters cast their ballot for president then just go down party lines to decide who to vote for.  Even the little research I did had me ultimately bouncing party to party when I voted.  It is an embarrassment, as especially these local decisions impact our lives so immediately and intimately.

And the next president?  I ultimately decided to vote for Obama.  I admire McCain greatly, but I could not get past how he demonstrted his analytical process to decide on his running mate along with other recent decisions (the bailout as one example).  Qualifications and capabilities are two entirely different things.  Just because the citizens of Alaska put Palin in office doesn’t automatically check off the box of either her qualifications or her capabilities.  We’ve lived through eight years of flippant, gut decisions finalized by a lack of analytical rigor.  That shouldn’t dictate a future choice, but it definitely heightens one’s awareness of who to choose presently.

I do think that the stature of the United States will get a lift from Obama’s election.  Europe will give the US a new chance, and it will be very important that Obama has a plan to capitalize on the good will that results.  I am not vehemently for Obama or against McCain, but I do feel this is the best choice.  My hope is that whichever of the two is elected will table every promise he made to get elected and get neck-deep into the mess that we’re in on all fronts.  What gets you elected is different than what you lead with, and McCain knows this more than anyone.  He tried to stay on the high road eight years ago.  Bush and his cronies slandered him with horrific messages, and the wonderful citizenry of South Carolina dutifully pushed our current President along his way.

My hope is that we finally have the burning platform to make real change in America, and here I’m not talking about chanting change ad nauseum.  What is real change in America?  First, make sure everyone understands this from Change Management 101:  change is painful.  No one wants change, and those that benefit from current state fight it the most.  Anyone proficient in driving change knows that it leaves carcasses all over the place and that getting to the finish line is neither predictable nor simple.

What are the particulars of real change in America?  Here are a few to consider:

• Infrastructure investment with high short-term cost and long-term payback
• Lowering the standard of living of almost all Americans from the easy-credit past 20+ years to one where smaller homes with smaller, fewer cars are filled with less stuff; the economic impact of doing this will be significant if it is achieved
• Reinventing our financial system and saving America fiscally
• Modifying the transformation of the US Armed Forces, ensuring that our Military leaders do not become deficient in waging war on the large-scale and in guerrilla theaters as they have become more proficient at managing occupation and nation-building
• Changing the culture of American families to produce a higher percentage of higher-performing students who achieve advanced education (>2 years of university), all while lowering the costs to achieve this while improving the means
• Lowering the costs to treat the massive 55+ year-old American population over the next twenty years
• Navigating dangerous international relations over the next ten years, including the following:  Iran, a China that needs to fuel its own growth and needs to continue to suck resources to do that, India, Russia
• Accelerating the move away from fossil fuel-based energy to sustainable energy; costs are becoming approachable finally as mass builds on many alternative sources (e.g., wind, solar, electric cars/transportation), and we should be relentless on this.  This will mean further job losses in current areas with job growth in others; again, disruptive in the short-term, but palatable as we’re in the midst of this (see Detroit).

So that’s that for me.  Call me a pragmatist, a pessimist, an old fart, whatever.  I don’t see Eutopia on the horizon, far from it.  I’d put it more like this.  You’re driving with your family to some vacation scam that you said yes to (the four-days, three nights at no cost if you look at their time share or something).  You’re not exactly sure what it will be like, but surely it’s better than chasing each other at your house for the week and everything that comes with that.  You can’t really afford to take off from work as you just had a negative performance review and your new boss has already fired half of your friends.  Oh, and you think your spouse could be cheating on you.  So you’re in the minivan four hours into the drive, your youngest son just threw up a few miles back.  Right in front of you is the biggest storm you’ve ever seen.  Brilliant lightning, sideways rain with some hail thrown in for good measure, horrible winds.  Cars off the road, pulled over, wrecking here and there.  And you’re about to drive head-long into it.

Welcome to America, 2009.  Good luck.

Brilliant piece of writing in the Atlantic on the philosophical struggles within the Army regarding the strategic direction of our military going forward.  If you read one thing today, read this.  I don’t know enough about this to really have an opinion, but it is quite possibly one of the most important debates impacting the future of America.  Should we create a nation-building Armed Forces or a battle-winning Armed Forces?  Do you cut the training in marksmanship while increasing the training in negotiation skills is a fascinating question.  Thoughts?

I can tell you that this world that we live in here in Suburbia of the ATL has been a jolt to the system over the last couple weeks.  New artifacts have popped into our collective psyche, much like mood rings and disco balls did thirty years ago.  Plastic bags on gas nozzles, Kroger traffic cops directing drivers through a maze in their parking lot to get to the pumps, numbers vacated from the signage at service stations (the sign that no fuel is available), snaking lines into traffic where there is fuel, abandoned cars in line for when fuel returns.  The excuse du jour for missing any event is lack of fuel.

I don’t think you can truly understand what it’s like unless you experience it for yourself.  This is a life-changing crisis that we’re in the midst of, life-changing in that it has quickly changed personal and collective behavior seemingly overnight.  It gives me a sense of what happens during wars, how you simply have to adjust to new realities and rules of society and life.

Add the catastrophic breakdown of the financial system to this, and we’re in the toughest America since at least 9/11, probably the toughest in my adult life, and possibly the toughest in my life.  One of the reasons the VP debates are being so eagerly anticipated is that people want a release from all this.  I watched some of the first Presidential debate on Friday, and it became clear to me that both of the candidates understood that this job one of them will take on will hardly be a rah-rah position.  He and we are faced with an America in even worse shape than we were in six months ago, and there will be no simple path for us.

I’m working on ideas for what happens next for people like us.  What will America be going forward.  Here are a couple of glimpses.  First, the citizenry has now been unleashed upon Congress like no time in its history.  The news clips of staffers and Congressmen holding up the stacks of printed emails shows that this crisis has now trained common Americans in how to proactively communicate with their Congressmen.  There will be no turning back from this, and it will become increasingly important how these officials collect and analyze the views of citizens in making their own decisions.  Blanket emails to Washington have been growing in popularity, but this pushes us into a new frontiers of interaction with the masses rather than just the talk radio listeners.

Another example seemingly distant from all of this is the education of our children.  Resources available to educate our children should decline in the next decade as government revenue declines, discretionary income for private education declines, and monies for educational infrastructure collapses.  Capable parents will need to take even more ownership of the intellectual advancement of their own children.  This may include some level of home schooling regardless of where their child attends school.  I’m a big advocate of public education, and we’re fortunate to live in a district whose high school ranks #3 in the state in SAT scores.  I’m skeptical of how this can be sustained as job losses accelerate over the next two years.

If you haven’t already, take a hard look at your finances, including your assets and debts.  Work aggressively on contingency plans if your own situation deteriorates.  I’m hoping I’ll collect some wisdom over the next week, but please don’t wait for that.  Become an expert on your own finances.

I’ve received many different links of thought leaders regarding the bailout.  The best synopsis I’ve seen is from Naked Capitalism’s Yves Smith (Why You Should Hate the Treasury Bailout Proposal).  Too many to list here, although I’ll try to update this page with as many as I can find.  Very busy the last couple days, so sorry for the lack of posts to all.  Definitely read the Yves Smith post before you do anything else.

I like to think I’m pretty smart, although I am the first to admit that I don’t know everything about everything.  High Finance is one example.  I’m pretty sketchy on advanced financial instruments, as well as the Corporate twists and turns used to create earnings out of thin air.  I’ve seen it at work all the time when I was in Corporate America, when several business units came in short only to see the company meet or exceed their promised earnings to Wall Street.

So you won’t find a detailed description of exactly what is going on Wall Street and in America.  Here’s the Cliffs Notes version: the Housing bubble created a ton of bad debt, the funds of that bad debt created alot of dissipating revenue that evaporated quickly, and the bad debt permeates a ton of disparate financial instruments held by a variety of big firms.  Firms and individuals ran up incredible profits as they whipped the money all over the place.  Everything was good, so everyone was smart.  Now, the next shoe is in the process of dropping.

And how has our leadership addressed all of this?  By acting much like my local Home Owners Association would (no disrespect intended to our HOA, a thankless job if there ever was one).  Get in a conference room, have snacks brought in, facilitate Bank of America’s acquisition of Merrill Lynch (check), tell Lehman Brothers they’re out of luck and can go into bankruptcy (check), decide to take over AIG (check), break for lunch (check).

Are these the correct decisions?  I have no idea.  These are the choices you make when you have no choices, and you have no choices because you wait until you have no choices.  And you wait until you have no choices because you don’t take ownership of an America and an economic situation that must be intimitely understood and mastered, at the first whiff of a stench not as an inferno rages around you.

It is very easy to point at the White House, and believe me, it is where ultimately I feel the problem is.  This is just one more example, in my mind, of an Administration that believes something philosophically, doesn’t take ownership, and isn’t proactive about mitigating risk and charting a clear path that may hurt us.

It is very easy to point at the White House, but that isn’t the problem.  The problem is that our nation, our citizens, you and I, cannot fix our system.  We do not put our best and brightest forth to lead the nation in evermore complex times and evermore complex situations.

Our problems aren’t soundbite problems, and they cannot be solved by studying talking points.  For some of these problems, the inability to accept short-term pain to minimize the impact of a situation causes us to suffer long-term struggles left with expensive choices which may not work.

W vs Gore.  W vs Kerry.  This is the best we can do?

Both of these parties are screaming change at the top of their lungs, but they created this with our encouragement.  What exactly are we talking about in change?

When I look at a business or personal, I try to see the glass as three-quarters empty instead of half full.  What is the potential downside, and how to I minimize it?  The Democrats have nominated a candidate high on charm and short on experience.  The Republicans have nominated a vice presidential candidate from the same cloth, who was basically mayor of Travelers Rest, SC (just north of G-Vegas) a couple years ago.

It is totally irrelevant which of these has the least amount of experience or whose experience is more relevant.  It is simply that two of the four potential leaders of our nation don’t have the greatest, broadest capabilities necessary to lead this great United States of America.

Remember the days when an NFL Head Coach would demand full control of the club, forcing them to give him the GM role as well as coaching?  Well, those days are gone.  The reason is that the job is just too complex, the competencies required too unique and too varied to be consistently housed in a single person.  Why are the Patriots the best run club in sports?  Because they have individuals in every position who are excellent at what they do and understand how to execute as part of an organization all headed in the same direction.

The President of the United States is an incredibly challenging job requiring tremendous people management skills, analytical abilities, charisma, candor and bluntness in examining a situation, strategic planning, fortitude, a balance of fearlessness with pragmatism, and content expertise on every topic from religion to economics to Southeast Asian fractional politics to military to science to environmentalism to aging to education to racial/ethnic issues to immigration.

This day, 17 September.  It is a dark day in a dark time in our nation.  And I have brought us here, me and the millions of neighbors across this nation.

It’s a long list, those avocations that consume Americans.  Head to your attic or garage, and you’ll find the relics like tennis rackets, skateboards, Rubic cubes, and yes, poker chips.  The newest thing sweeping the States?  Bashing anyone who chats about poliitcs.

IGGY’s taken barbs, along with everyone from Don to my favorite sports radio show (the Herd) and my favorite daily soccer podcast, World Soccer Daily.   Toss one comment or opinion about the Presidential race, and a firestorm of criticism comes your way.

I actually think that is part of the problem.  With the explosion of cable outlets and talk radio, more and more of our opinions are shaped by a core group of pundits and talking heads from both sides of the aisles.  It is counterintuitive, I know, but there it is.  Don’t believe this?  Listen or watch one of the ladies or guys that you don’t agree with, then listen to those you bump into at the water cooler or at the soccer game over the next week.  We’ve become a nation shaped by propaganda, and we have powerful engines who shape large chunks of us on a variety of topics.  Disney/ABC/ESPN does it to us on sports.  The GOP and Democratic Party does it to us on politics.

The problem with our America is that the needs, opinions, and views of its populace doesn’t break neatly into two buckets anymore.  At the same time, we’ve run into a bad period of time where the two political parties regularly fail to produce the best America has to offer.  How can McCain select Palin knowing that he will be the oldest elected president to take office?  It is his responsibility as a future President to assume that he will die in office.  I hope he lives to be 100, but you have to plan for the contingency if you say you are the right choice for President.  Anything short of that is reckless.

Obama is charasmatic, no doubt, and it is almost funny that this has been turned into one of his flaws.  Yet the situation is no different in that party either.  He’s inspirational, no doubt, but the questions of his capabilities and experience aren’t slanderous.  They are real.  With Obama and Palin, we’re saying the highest office in America is second only to NBA coaches in the prerequisite for actual experience.

And let’s put aside all of the partisan red herrings, shall we?  My wife forwarded one of these email chain letters about Obama raising taxes.  My comment to her was uncharacteristically blunt and passionate.  I know absolutely nothing about Obama’s plans for taxes, but let’s put this in proper context.  Our nation has its Armed Forces deployed in a foreign, sovereign land.  Men and women are dying weekly.  I am bearing absolutely no cost to that.  Our infrastructure is barren and broken, from the product of our education system to the physical infrastructure of our lands to the energy consumption and production of our nation to the natural resource consumption and production of our land and, increasingly, the developing world.  Our long-term commitments are underfunded (see General Motors et al for symptoms of what happens next).  Our country is diving deeper and deeper in debt to peoples who do not share our motives nor our values.  Our Federal Government has demonstrated a long-term inability to solve long-term problems.

And we’re realistically whining that our taxes may go up?

There’s no mystery here.  Our taxes should go up while our level of services should go down.  In case we need a primer here, we are spending more in areas we historically have not spent more in (e.g., the Military), and we are taking in less in the process.  The costs born by our citizens have increased, as have the costs born by our massive Government.

Maybe none of this should be talked about during an election, I don’t know.  Both parties understand without a doubt that the objective in an election is to get elected.  Both parties, by and large, are competent enough not to give an opinion that will cut themselves off from a group of voters crucial to getting elected.

So really, we’re left to ourselves to talk about this stuff and try to raise both the awareness and importance of what’s really important in our nation.  Shout it out, whatever your opinion.  If you’re a reader, lurker, listener, or viewer of a content-specific source of humor, content, or community, embrace it and dont’ fight it.  “I don’t want to hear about politics on your _______ site/show/program,” is a cop-out.  I’d much rather hear about it or read about it there than listen or read the pundits.  Don’t forget.  We are America.

The Atlantic is bookmarked I think because my brother occasionally forwards things to me from it.  In the September 2008 issue, there is a brilliant article detailing the Senator Hillary Clinton campaign, looking in a detailed manner at how the staff worked to lose the Democratic nomination.  The core lesson to me is a lack of execution, the inability to decide on a path then complete actions with hopes for an expected outcome.  Regadless of who you have supported or do support, it is a fascinating read.  We can all learn from this in our professional lives especially.

In an ironic twist for me, I awarded a Republic of Georgia national jersey to the soccer coach working with me to launch a new soccer club (the new little hobby that has consumed me the last two months).  We used the specific red in the Georgia’s flag for the logo design of the new club.  All of this was the first I’d really thought of this nation in my life.  Since I handed Coach David that jersey, his homeland has been in upheaval, his brother was called into active duty since he was slightly under 50 years of age, even though he’d only recently had open-heart surgery.  He was raised as a Georgian Soviet, played football professionally in the Soviet Union, and won what would now be the Champions League back in the 1980’s.

So Russia has been at war with this nation over the last week, and today a cease fire has been announced.  Should we care about any of this?

Not only should we care about all of this, but we should be stunned by both the turn of events as well as anxious about the next decade.

Georgia was one of the few nations who joined the US in Iraq, brought to our collective attention when 2,000 troops were ordered back to Georgia this past week.  They have pursued NATO membership, wishing to join the ranks of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, and Slovakia among others.  President Bush was the first and only US president ever to visit the Republic of Georgia.

Regardless of who exactly did what to start this, Russia has been waging war against Georgia over the last week.  The US response seems to have been limited to chatting at the Olympics between Bush and Putin, as well as some sort of assistance to get the 2,000 Georgian troops from Iraq back to Georgia.

The aftermath of all this is much more important than the actual incident, with my apologies to the families of soldiers and civilians who lost their lives in Georgia this week.  Georgia is a relatively new ally of the US, much like Pakistan for that matter.  What exactly does that buy you in our new world order?  Who sets our foreign policy when it comes to our alliances, the President or Congress?  And how exactly should all of this work in the future?

Obviously, the US did not come to the defense of our dear friends, the Georgians.  We did not cut off diplomatic ties with Russia, did not send in aircraft to support the troops.  What have we told Russia, France, England, India, Pakistan, North Korea, China, Uganda, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Vietnam, Serbia, and countless others around the world?

No, the 21st Century is a much more complex one when it comes to good and evil, friend and foe.  Throw in diminishing raw materials and a finite energy supply, and we have indeed entered into a world of fractured misunderstanding.  We have only a hint of realization that we poorly understand these sub-nations, these emerging places of interest.

We had a severe problem once at the Aerospace company I worked in when we lived in Phoenix, and the CEO had a day where everyone would “Stand Down.”  Basically, we took a day where everyone stopped to focus on our core problem, much as he said the Navy would do in a time of crisis.

In the midst of this Election period and the aftermath of Iraq and this crisis in Georgia, it is time for a “Stand Down” for our leaders; really, for all of us.

With Senator Barack Obama’s late surge of delegates yesterday, the inevitable has been realized:  an Obama-McCain race to the finish line.  I’m on the team with all three candidates that the result of our choices in November must mark a comprehensive, seismic shift in America’s policies, actions, and resulting influence around the world.

The Wall Street Journal has a lengthy analysis of what went wrong with Senator Hillary Clinton’s run for the nomination (can’t link it as it is a subscriber-only article).  They cite Mismanagement, a Flawed Message (experience vs the change movement), Failure to Mobilize, and Clinton Craziness (i.e., her spouse).  Fundamentally, I don’t think she and her team understood the deep, lingering resentment and ill feelings that many of us normal Americans felt toward she and her husband.  I think it was always going to be a huge battle between Senator Clinton and whomever emerged as the alternate, anybody-but-a-Clinton candidate.  That the finalist just happened to be a charismatic, fresh-faced outsider made it even tougher to head toward her.

Senator John McCain, in my opinion, should be completing his second term in office rather than preparing for a bitter race toward the November elections.  It was during the South Carolina primary in the 2000 campaign that Governor George W. Bush brought out all the stops to cast doubt about McCain in the eyes of my wife’s home state.  The specifics of the assault I’m not exactly familiar with (here is a laundry list of either accurate or inaccurate information), but this summary from Richard Davis in a 2004 Boston Globe article has a nice synopsis.  I’m pretty sure I would have voted for McCain had he won the GOP nomination, and I am absolutely certain that America and the world would be significantly different had he been our President in 2001.

There will be a sizable groups who will blindly head to the polls in November with their minds made up without much thought.  Obama won this race partly due to his race and the dramatically high percentage of African Americans who voted for him.  These large percentages should be repeated in November, just as a chunk of America will vote against him due to his skin color.  A chunk of America will salute the donkey and elephant flags and line up behind them.  Some states are decided basicallly, so it falls to our brains hopefully to dive into these two, see into the future as much as possible, then make our decisions.

CC, officially Undecided.

(Photo:  AP)

It is so very easy to see this world of ours solely from our corner of it.  We all learned about our nation’s history as a melting pot, a place for people all around the world to come and have a chance at freedom and success.

Some of those places were bad placed, nations who were self-proclaimed enemies of ours, nations who took a different path than ours, nations whose people had less human rights than ours, nations who looked and spoke and lived differently than we do.

China is one of those lands.  The country has been flipped on its head since I first visited Beijing in 1994.  Very few Westerners visited then; in fact, you could count the number of Western hotels in Beijing on one hand.  I wasn’t a very experienced traveler, so all of it was a bit bewildering for me.  I made the good decision to have a young engineer give me a tour in and around Beijing, and so we saw Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, and the Great Wall.  My favorite memory of that trip was going to a ceramic factory, where entire families of grandparents and parents and children made beautiful vases and other items.  They hand-bent slivers of tin and brass to create the ornate designs then filled these patterns with whatever you use to make such things.  We still have the vase which I brought back from that trip.

I’ve been back probably ten times since then, traveling to the big cities as well as into the rural areas outside of Shanghai.  The one thing about this land that has stayed with me since my first trip there was just how many people a billion people is (now 1.3bil, I believe).  Every conceivable contraption that can have a minimum of two wheels is driven or ridden on impossible paths and roads and highways to carry impossible loads of stuff from here to there.

We’ve been led to believe that this is a country of evil people, a Communist country at one time looking to conquer Southeast Asia unless we prevented it.  I’ve never been much of a revisionist historian, and I do not fault the slippery slope that led us to the Korean War and to Vietnam.  Our logic was based on the domino theory, that if one of these countries slipped into China’s grip, then the entire region would eventually capitulate.

I must admit I am only recently learning about what’s going on in Darfur and China’s role in blocking UN efforts to take action on the government there.  China has invested significantly in the oil industry in the Sudan, and this is an example of their policy to go directly after raw materials procurement at the source rather than buying on the open market.

So, it’s easy to compartmentalize a nation of evil people led by evil men and women who have zero human rights, a nation of foreigners speaking multiple languages with so many people that they even manipulate the birth rate and skew the percentage of boys born due to their One Child program.

(Photo:  Getty Images)

Yes, it’s easy until you see that the tears of a child in China who has lost her mother are no different than the tears of a child in Birmingham who has lost his father.  35,000 people lost, a number that may grow to 50,000 among a people of 1.3 billion.  Then 158 relief workers die in a mudslide as they frantically care for those injured and mourning and in shock.

And you see that the people of China place as much value on each life lost as we do.  Their nation mourns, and their leaders are faced with challenges that seem overwhelming.  5,000,000 people left homeless?  That would be all people in Minnesota or Colorado told to get out of their homes immediately.

As I head to grab lunch, I am struck by this question:  am I connected to any of this?  Do the tears of that young girl, do they fall on my cheek?  And should they?