The art of the follow through

 

 

"Where is the ball going to end up? Who cares?"

Many, many years ago, as a young boy, I developed an interest in tennis. We had a park not far from our house that had two tennis courts. I wanted to play, but knew I was not that good. So I signed up to take some community tennis lessons. The young man who was teaching the class was impressed with the force in how hard I hit the ball - he was much less than impressed with my accuracy. He pulled me aside and said, "Your biggest problem is your follow through. You can hit the ball as hard as you want, but with no follow through, you have no aim. Your success in any game will be dependent on your aim."

There are two things this past week that made me think of that tennis lesson. First, I am so mad I could spit tacks on this cut in the food stamp program. What a self inflicted wound this was! The Administration is now forecasting possible social unrest; food shelves are predicting chaos.

Way back, when the "Stimulus Package" was put together, it ended up just being nothing more than a "grab bag" of goodies. It was suppose to be for programs or projects that would unstick a stuck economy. Instead, we got a bill which many contributed to, and yet nobody (including the President) read. Some knucklehead along the way stuck in a "temporary" increase to food stamp assistance which would expire on October 31, 2013.

I know. You are thinking what in the world does that have to do with creating jobs? Nothing. Then you might ask, what was the plan for when the temporary nature of this increase ran out on October 31, 2013? Again, nothing. To quote my tennis lesson, no follow through. No thinking. No planning. In other words, typical government bureaucratic work. Messy and sloppy. Now we are stuck with a whole bunch of people who believe they got screwed and don't know why.

The second thing that happened was an article in the paper this morning. Due to the liberal nature of the home town "fish wrap", I could not believe they printed it. It seems that shortly after the ACA was signed into law, two in the President's inner circle warned him that the Administration did not have the skill set to pull this off. They were too "insular" (other might argue "arrogant"). Those "nay-sayers" were blown off and ignored. "Hey, we know what we are doing - we are the wizard's of smart after all." Well, we get to October 1, 2013 and the "nay-sayers" appear to be correct. The ACA train is off the tracks. Why? No follow through. Just pass something and throw it over the wall. Get on to the next adventure. Things will work their way out. No, Mr. President - they did not, and we now have a hot mess on our hands.

So what have we learned from these two miscues? Nothing. No, we now want to move on to immigration reform with the same set of government "best practices" firmly in place. In other words, once again no follow through. Just like on the tennis court, we have shown we can hit a ball very hard, but where it ends up, who knows.