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.

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.

OK, this is a bit complicated, so hang in for a second.

We’re all quite familiar with how the television has changed over our lifetime (my lifetime). When I first watched “Days of our Lives” with my Mom, television was black in white in so many ways. We had two or three channels (NBC, CBS, and ETV sometimes) on our black and white set. Clear cut choices, either this or that. ABC joined the mix on some weird second dial (the regular channels went 2-13, and ABC was on Channel 16).

Fast forward to today, and I have a couple dozen high-definition channels and who knows how many channels (I stumble upon new channels when I’m surfing the guide). I can watch shows on stations so specialized now that the interested audience seems to be the size of our neighborhood. The major network’s viewers have fractured their viewing behaviors as they have become more nuanced in the specifics of what they do and don’t want to watch.

So what does that have to do with the price of tea in China? Plenty.

Obama and Clinton are in a slugfest for the Democratic nomination while McCain sits with the Republican nomination. Democratic Party officials wring their hands about the damage this is causing while the GOP squeals with glee. And what is the difference?

Proportional delegates vs winner-take-all.

You see, we Americans no longer do what we’re told nor think what we’re supposed to. Pundits are searching for the next Soccer Mom category of citizens that, if only they could figure out the segment’s characteristics and then bombard them with marketing, could get them elected.

Let’s look at how neatly I fit into a category. I’m fiscally conservative, have a passion for taking on our long-term problems, was vehemently against invading Iraq yet feel we now can’t quickly pull out, feel we have to reinvent ourselves on the global stage, pro-NAFTA, feel manufacturing jobs leaving the US will only accelerate, socially compassionate, passionately pro-public education yet feel the greatest problem with US education is rooted in our social problems (single parent homes, lack of parental involvement in their child’s education in pre-K through middle school), green but not a nutjob. What will my criteria be for casting my vote in November? I haven’t the foggiest.

And that’s just me. If the GOP had a proportional scheme for linking primary votes to delegate assignment, I assure you we’d still have candidates banging one another. Jump up to 30,000 feet, and the question starts to look like this: who gets to decide on our next President? Suburbanites? Southern working class? The struggling poor? Those over 50? Those under 30? If there is any lesson that we can gain from this campaign, it’s that the US is no longer a clean-cut nation. I would guess we haven’t been for awhile; regardless, we’re a fractured nation. If we had a parliamentary system, where niche groups built a coalition to select a Prime Minister, I assume we would quickly see a dozen political parties and new governments on a pace more like Israel’s revolving door than our current model.

Is this a good assessment, should we care, what does this mean to the three candidates and two parties, and what does this mean for each of us?