OP-ED: Why No Farm Club for National Leadership?

Consider….

  Everywhere you look this time of year there are farm clubs for major
league baseball working out with the big boys to see who can make it
to the big time.  Then there are professional football drafts to
compete for top collegiate talent of last year to see whom the pro’s
can lure to their teams with big time contracts.

Fascinating isn’t it how many billions go into nurturing young and
developing talent for sports. But why are there no “farm clubs” to
seek out and nurture talent for national leadership which has been
conspicuously in need for more  years than we like to believe, and
from both political parties?

  Why could we not dispatch talent scouts to colleges and universities
to discover  bright young men and women who demonstrate leadership
capacities regardless of any political party leanings?  In fact, why
could we not do the same to high schools across the nation to offer
full scholarships as we do for athletes for young people eager to
enter the political world with a view to “turning pro” much the same
as football and other scholarship athletes do?

  These carefully measured students would be afforded exposure to
specially developed government leadership programs without any
emphasis on specific political parties or philosophies….on the rules
and demands of national leadership and how to emerge eventually as
managers of the nation’s future.

  Model governments could be designed at qualified institutions with
scholarship students rotating in key positions and responsible to
model legislatures, all having to operate within the scope of
constitutional law and with a model Supreme Court to review cases
where differences arise.

  You get the drift of how this could be done under nonpartisan guidance
to design and implement the model governmental operations.

  As things stand today, lots of money and public relations puffery
begin molding and marketing potential candidates in all ways except
for nurturing their governmental understanding and the ways to manage
the huge responsibilities of national leadership.

  The results of our pandering to special interests of the right and
left for many years have been  heavy handed investment from special
interests of both corporate and labor powers to get their designated
candidates elected to the highest offices in the land.

  It is no longer a question of something to be desired down the road.
Surely the extended embarrassments called debates on fiscal cliffs and
sequestration must have made the urgent need for change clear to
anyone willing to put aside political affiliations and look to the
nation’s future.


No doubt there will be heavy resistance to such an approach by the
established powers of the political parties and the existing elected
officials from the President of the United States to both Houses of
Congress, as well as those from the outside heavily invested in those
powerful figures.

  What is proposed here may well be naïve to the know-it-alls who must
protect their bastions of power,  But dreams and demands for what can
be done for the nation’s future are almost always met with sneers
instead of cheers.                        
 * * *

Joseph J. Honick is an international consultant to business and government -- based in Bainbridge Island, WA -- and writes for many publications, including www.huntingtonnews.net.