It's already been too much for too long with too few details. The candidates vying for the win in November's election sound the same: I have a plan ... . The art of circumlocution is honed to a dull roar of meaningless patter at each stop on the campaign trail. I have a plan; you have a plan: my plan is better than your plan, but neither one of us can reveal our plan because it may not be as good a plan as the other guy's plan, and on and on and on it goes.
I don't want to know that you have a plan: I want to know what your plan is!! As a classroom teacher, I was required to have a specific lesson plan each and every day of the semester for each and every class/course that I was responsible for teaching. I could not tell my supervising administrator that my educational goal is "I hope to teach these students" because s/he wanted to know WHAT I would teach, how I would teach it (including the PowerPoint presentations with the bulleted major points), and what measurable outcomes I would use to evaluate the students' progress toward a specific goal.
I could not walk into a classroom with "hope" and call it either a lesson plan or an achievable educational goal. Hope is what I have; measurable outcomes are what the students' either achieve or fail to achieve. I could try blaming the previous teacher(s), but that sounds so ... whiny, unprofessional, irrevelant to MY job performance. It's always a factor, but my job was to find a way to progress beyond what last year's teachers did or failed to do, not go back 4 or 8 or 12 years ago and pin the blame on those teachers.
Ditto the political arena: don't tell me what failed in the past and then what you hope will happen once you are elected; instead, share the specifics of how you will achieve specific goals. If you believe you can add 2 million jobs in a faltering job market, tell me how you are going to do that ... specifically, and what measurable outcomes apply to your successful completion of that action plan. If you say you have yet another plan to turn this economy around, detail the key elements of that plan, as well as the contingencies for altering the plan if it does not go as planned. Blaming the past administrations and/or the opposing party is NOT a Plan B; these are tough times that require specific actions to happen before the economy can rebound, actions that begin when the person responsible for initiating them has a specific action plan that we, the voters, can understand and support, as well as measurable outcomes that detail what "I hope" looks like, rather than the old "just you wait and see" promise.
If you are still promising hope with your rhetoric, but cannot provide the educational plan and measurable outcomes in a PowerPoint presentation, I'm not tossing away my one ballot/one vote on your personal positive outlook on life.
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2 comments:
And, unfortunately, Obama had lot of rhetoric that didn't provide a plan in his acceptance speech last night.
And Mitt claims you can go to his website and read his plan-- the problem is, there are no real plans there, either. Just goals. And most of those goals look remarkable similar to the goals the current President has for the country (because they both want to tell the American public the same thing: they will lower the deficit, create jobs, and do *something* (one of the few places they differ) for Medicare/SSN, and increase American's wages).
Right now, between the very few differences I see between the two candidates, I will pick Obama over Romney for completely selfish reasons: Romney wants to repeal "Obamacare" and replace it with... something. I'd rather keep it and be protected by it as crucial parts I need for my particular health issues come into play in 2013-14 than take a gamble on the vague promises that Romney plans to replace it with (so far). I also do not want my SS$ put into the market or the market to be deregulated again, which caused much of the issues during Bush's two terms (and exploded in 2007/2008).
But I'll tell you right now: if a strong third candidate came out and had actual plans, like you suggest, rather than goals, I'd vote for him/her in a heart beat over either of these two.
Me, too. It is so frustrating to hear bloated rhetoric that says nothing concrete. I'd rather vote for someone's specific plan than believe all the pie-in-the-sky hopes that sound a whole lot more like the song of the same name than policy.
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