… and it’s not just the fact that it isn’t 1980 any more.

Kristol, having noticed that Ronald Reagan is dead, compares the election of Ronald Reagan to a famous quotation of William Faulkner about Pickett’s Charge. This is Faulkner —

For every Southern boy 14 years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armstead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a 14-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago .  .  .

—William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust

Faulkner, of course, is describing a desire to go back to the moment before the Cause was Lost, before Robert E. Lee sent 9 infantry brigades across an open field to attack the center of the Union line at Gettysburg, resulting in a bloodbath from which the Confederacy never recovered. The war continued, but for a time it was commonly felt the South lost the war on that field.

Kristol evokes Faulkner to wax nostalgic about the election of Reagan —

For every American conservative, not once but whenever he wants it, it’s always the evening of November 4, 1980, the instant when we knew Ronald Reagan, the man who gave the speech in the lost cause of 1964, leader of the movement since 1966, derided by liberal elites and despised by the Republican establishment, the moment when we knew—he’d won, we’d won, the impossible dream was possible, the desperate gamble of modern conservatism might pay off, conservatism had a chance, America had a chance. And then, a decade later—the Cold War won, the economy revived, America led out of the abyss, we’d come so far with so much at stake—conservatism vindicated, America restored, a desperate and unbelievable victory for the cast made so many years ago against such odds.

And I’m thinking, WTF? Because it’s really the rest of us who ought to be comparing November 4, 1980, to Pickett’s Charge. “For every American liberal there is the instant when Ronald Reagan wasn’t elected yet …” That would be the parallel to Faulkner.

America didn’t actually end that day, but someday historians may say November 4, 1980, was the beginning of the end.

Kristol doesn’t actually concede the election to Democrats as much as say that none of the pack of mutts running for the nomination could fill Reagan’s shoes, and if elected, that president will not lead us into a Second Morning in America. Well, thanks for that, anyway.

Here’s a fascinating article by Nicholas Confessore in the New York Times. Apparently the Republican Party is no longer being run by the Republican Party. Instead, its direction is being managed by a dozen or so powerful men —

But almost none of them hold office or a job with the Republican Party itself. Instead, they represent conservative groups that channeled tens of millions of dollars into last year’s Congressional campaign. And as 2012 approaches, the groups — among them the Karl Rove-founded American Crossroads, the Republican Governors Association, the American Action Network and Americans for Prosperity, which is backed by the billionaire Koch brothers — have gathered into a loosely organized political machine poised to rival, and in many ways supplant, the official Republican Party apparatus.

This crew has taken over efforts to defeat Obama and pick off vulnerable Dems in the House and Senate.

Like the party committees they are rapidly coming to eclipse, the independent groups are financed by some of the Republican Party’s wealthiest donors and operated by some of its most respected operatives and strategists. But thanks to the Citizens United decision, the independent groups can raise money in unlimited amounts and with negligible overhead. Much of the money will be spent through not-for-profit organizations that are not required to disclose their donors.

Most of the groups answer only to a few dozen deep-pocketed donors, rather than the elected officials who oversee traditional party efforts.

This is the 1 percent of the 1 percent. And they own the Republican Party. Not so much the Dems:

Democrats are also setting up independent groups that are staffed by party veterans. But those efforts appear to be progressing more slowly, in part because there is less of a vacuum to fill. Mr. Obama, the most prodigious fund-raiser in the country, has been able to inject tens of millions of dollars in campaign financing into the Democratic National Committee.

This is truly dangerous stuff.

“As a result of his efforts, Godfather’s Pizza sales were reduced from $275 million in 1986 to $242.5 million in 1988.” — Herman Cain’s Wikipedia bio

Herman Cain is touting is business management experience as his chief qualification to be President, but Susan Saulny writes for the New York Times that managing Cain is like managing a herd of cats.

But interviews with Mr. Cain’s former staff members, volunteers and supporters give a glimpse of a candidate who appeared to show ambivalence toward basic campaign management, which led to problems in hiring, scheduling, fund-raising and messaging.

Together, these problems are at odds with a central theme of his candidacy. Because Mr. Cain does not have a legislative or political track record, his campaign rests heavily on the contention that he would bring proven, executive-level expertise from the business world to the White House.

Ex-staffers also say that Cain maintains distance from his staff, who have been told to not speak to him unless spoken to.

Some former aides said they had longed to see the problem-solving side of Mr. Cain, or to see Mr. Cain at all. Over the spring and summer, he did not spend much time with workers. He did not plan conference calls or staff meetings and was given to changing his mind about appearances, sometimes with little notice, a tendency that angered his field workers.

“It was frustrating because we couldn’t get him here as much as I was led to believe he was going to be here,” said Kevin Hall, who worked for Mr. Cain in Iowa in June.

“Everything we tried to do was like pulling teeth to get accomplished,” said a former staff member in Iowa, who asked for anonymity. “I’ve never been involved in a job that was as frustrating as this one. We couldn’t get an answer on anything. Everything was fly by the seat of your pants.”

This is actually standard behavior for CEOs in Corporation World. Most big companies don’t get things done because of the brilliant leadership of the head of the corporation. They get things done because over time they’ve put procedures in place that delegate responsibilities and that enable staffs to work together to accomplish complex tasks without having to re-invent the wheel every other day. Institutional memory helps, also, as do having competent employees in key positions far, far below executive level.

Wikipedia defines “business management” this way:

Management in all business and organizational activities is the act of getting people together to accomplish desired goals and objectives using available resources efficiently and effectively. Management comprises planning, organizing, staffing, leading or directing, and controlling an organization (a group of one or more people or entities) or effort for the purpose of accomplishing a goal. Resourcing encompasses the deployment and manipulation of human resources, financial resources, technological resources and natural resources.

What has Cain actually managed? In the 1980s he was in charge of 400 Burger Kings in Philadelphia for three years, and during his tenure his Burger Kings gained considerably in profitability. So Pillsbury promoted him by putting him in charge of Godfather’s Pizza, which he royally screwed up. Then he and some other upper-level executives bought Godfather’s from Pillsbury, and after that sales were steady, but when he resigned ten years later the business still wasn’t making as much money as it was making before Cain became CEO.

Then he was CEO of the National Restaurant Association, a lobbying group; chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank in Kansas City; and he sits on a number of corporate boards of directors. While all that makes for a respectable resume, and certainly requires him to have some control of an organization, I don’t see that he’s had much success with enterprises that involve complex logistics, and he doesn’t seem to have ever been part of a team that produced anything tangible, like a new model of toaster.

In my experience, CEOs rarely come up through the ranks of production, manufacturing or engineering. They come from finance, advertising, marketing. They make decisions about money, sales, acquisitions. Often they have only a vague idea how the products their company sells actually get made. Nor do they care. As a rule they don’t deal with employees below the upper management level. Often they aren’t even that bright; they’re just really aggressive and narcissistic and intimidate everyone around them into obedience. Their success often depends on the quality of the staffs they assemble around them who take care of the details, like actually managing.

That’s a generalization, of course, and I’m sure there are exceptions. Most of my experience with them comes from dealing with CEOs who had written books, and I was the editorial production manager responsible for getting the manuscript edited, typeset, printed, and bound. So they had to deal with a peon like me. There was only one author in my how-to-succeed-in-business group who was a nice guy, but he wasn’t a CEO but a consultant who specialized in taking over failing companies and turning them around. He cleaned up after the standard CEO type had crashed and burned, in other words. I could tell he was a good manager, because he respected the process. He did what I asked him to do and kept to the schedule.

My other CEOs thought the schedule was a nuisance, but they still expected their books to be published when they wanted them published. We underlings were magically supposed to make up for the time they lost.

Talk to just about anybody who has worked in the product development, engineering, production, or manufacturing department of a big corporation, and they’ll tell you the same thing. The people at the head of the company were completely cut off from the process of making the products and getting them on the shelves. Their only involvement with products is to declare they want X product on the shelves in 3 months, even though the process would normally take 9 months. They don’t care, and nobody ever says no to them. So the little ants in the cubicle farm spend the three months working 12-hour days and cutting every corner in creation, praying that nobody makes a mistake and orders bottle caps that don’t fit the bottles.

From the beginning I’ve suspected that Cain was that sort of CEO, the type who “manages” by barking out an order and expecting his underlings to figure out how to give him what he wants. You could see the same trait in G.W. Bush, who seemed to think that declaring an intention to do something was the same thing as actually doing it.

Cain’s campaign staff is stymied at every turn over what ought to be simple tasks, like acquiring an email address or having bumper stickers made. He needs to hire someone to manage that, and apparently he hasn’t, and he is too disorganized to do it himself.

You could argue that a President doesn’t have to know how toasters get made, either. But the interesting thing about a President is that they actually have less power in their organization that CEOs do in theirs. If a future CEO-president ever tries to run the country like they run corporations, by capriciously barking out orders and expecting the underlings to carry them out (which, I understand, is how Rick Scott is trying to govern Florida), he’ll be in for a shock.

Just spotted at Wikipedia — I took a screenshot to preserve it for posterity —

Click for full size

Cain’s affiliation with the Federal Reserve (he is a former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City) is causing a stir in some quarters of the Web, but not one that will be fatal to him, I don’t think. The Federal Reserve — not it’s current leadership, but the fact that it exists at all — has become something of a bogyman in the political fringes.

Someday when they write the history of warped campaign ads, this will be among them. Spoof, or legit? I can’t decide.

This is a real Cain ad, and it is pretty weird too.