Politics always seems to stimulate my blog readership. By politics I mean the function of life in the political world.
If you are not in politics you are unlikely to understand what I say here. You can make a note of what I said, but it won't ring true.
Politics is mastering the art of getting other people by the balls. In politics the phrase is not 'by the balls' it is 'by the short hairs' .... I interpret this to mean pubic hair. Lyndon Johnson was known in Washington as the master of ‘short hairs’.
What it means is that every person in politics has something they want desperately and something they want kept very secret. You have someone by the balls when their political choice must be determined by your use of leverage on them either by appealing to their desires or their terror. A politician is a person for whom many people have their desires available as leverage and many people leverage their terror as well.
Of course I know this sounds strange and maybe preposterous. But what is most evident is that the longer people are in a new role, speaker or president, the fewer actions they take and the more cautious is their behavior. This is because as time goes by there are more people who have the politician by the balls and are pulling in opposite, painful, directions.
Enough. If you are in politics you know how painfully true this description is. If you are not it must sound ridiculous.
In the corporate world there is some similar phenomena, but in most cases managers are forced to choose between many very similar options with dissimilar outcomes. Not desires and terrors. Too many things look like a 5.1 or 5.2 or 5.3 choice but one has a 7.6 outcome while another has a 4.9 outcome. Business is much more a matter of carefully graduated choices and much less an emotionally painful balancing of desire and terror.
If you are not in politics you are unlikely to understand what I say here. You can make a note of what I said, but it won't ring true.
What it means is that every person in politics has something they want desperately and something they want kept very secret. You have someone by the balls when their political choice must be determined by your use of leverage on them either by appealing to their desires or their terror. A politician is a person for whom many people have their desires available as leverage and many people leverage their terror as well.
Of course I know this sounds strange and maybe preposterous. But what is most evident is that the longer people are in a new role, speaker or president, the fewer actions they take and the more cautious is their behavior. This is because as time goes by there are more people who have the politician by the balls and are pulling in opposite, painful, directions.
Enough. If you are in politics you know how painfully true this description is. If you are not it must sound ridiculous.
In the corporate world there is some similar phenomena, but in most cases managers are forced to choose between many very similar options with dissimilar outcomes. Not desires and terrors. Too many things look like a 5.1 or 5.2 or 5.3 choice but one has a 7.6 outcome while another has a 4.9 outcome. Business is much more a matter of carefully graduated choices and much less an emotionally painful balancing of desire and terror.