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What Kind of American Leader? Do Focus Polls Make a Leader?

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There are more than a dozen GOP candidates still in the 2016 race for President and every day I hear from a great many of them via email. These campaign letters have me thinking though, and I don’t like what I see from most.

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Among the most egregious was one sent a few weeks ago by the Jeb! 2016 campaign. Annoying but wise to have left off his last name. ‘Bush’ is not likely to enhance the number of votes, even among the GOP. The purpose of the email, sent a few days before the last Republican debate, was to ask this question: Will you take 10 seconds right now before this big debate to let me know what issue is most important to you?” The letter goes on to say something about ‘listening to the American voter,’ an obvious and pretty lame smokescreen. This isn’t about listening to the American voter – the question was asked to win the debate.

What kind of question is it anyway? What kind of leader takes a poll to determine his platform? Someone who sticks his/her finger in the air to see which way the wind blows? Someone who does that, is not a leader, but a follower. What America needs is a leader. We must get that message to “leadership” of the RNC. ‘Leaders’ are meant to lead not ask where the focus should be. The RNC didn’t get the memo.

Anyone who cannot provide a quick list of major issues or doesn’t know what he would tackle in his/her first 100 days in office must not be elected president. Furthermore, a lot of polls have been taken on all sorts of issues. It should not be hard to determine where the American people stand on most of them, and how important a given issue is to them.

So much depends on how the question is phrased, among other things (e.g. a standardized test given after lunch the day before Thanksgiving will not yield the same results as the same test given on a weekday morning the following week to the same students). In other words, timing is important but one would never know that from the methods of some presidential candidates.

One candidate, who has experience in the construction trade, made it clear he wants to build a wall between the USA and its neighbor to the south. Regardless of your opinion of him, or his chances of winning, that builds (no pun intended) upon what he knows. This is not to endorse or condemn the man, but rather is a good example of what should be done. In graduate school I was told to “build upon what you know” and it is good advice. There is a time and place for branching out, trying new things, or facing new circumstances, but when running for president, stick with what you know.

Many other candidates combine the same question Jeb Bush asked with fund-raising letters. Efficient? I guess. But efficiency is not an issue with most of them. Even a news junky like this writer had trouble identifying former governor Jim Gilmore. And what is it with former governor Pataki and a few others who are not even polling at 1% – one can understand if they formerly had big numbers, like Rand Paul, or have a unique message, again like Paul. But frankly it looks like many of them are actually running for Vice President, or worse that these are simply ego trips. It would be far more efficient to have fewer candidates. But I’m glad there is a large field at this point. It provides evidence that the GOP is who they say they are: the big tent party. It’s early in the campaign, and the less time the MSM has to take pot shots at the GOP candidates, the better.

Linked at BadBlue where there’s uncensored news 24/7. Read it here.

Linked in Theo Spark’s Daily Spark – read necessary-to-know news here.

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