Business Acumen

It goes without saying that President Bush's business career was not very inspiring. He worked for a variety of businesses each of which largely failed. And yet, for President Bush, failure was never the end. There was always someone there to pick him up, dust him off, and give him tons of money. Frankly, they were probably there to catch him before he even landed.

And why?

Well it wasn't because of his business acumen. It was strictly because of his connections. His only success in business was that other people liked using him to get help from his father.

To quote Salon's Joan Walsh, in a review of several biographies of President Bush, "Then came the putative "entrepreneurial" years, when Bush returned to his dad's Midland, Texas, oil roots and got family and friends to help him fail ever upward. Eventually he turned his investment in the aptly named, money-losing Arbusto Energy into a million-dollar stake in a much bigger firm and ponied up about $600,000 for a tiny share of the Texas Rangers baseball team, which was worth almost $15 million when he sold it last year. (To be fair, maybe the books explain more than I've given them credit for. Because if your life worked out this dang well, you might wanna run for president, too.)"

Yep. That's not of course what life teaches most of us. Most of us learn, sooner or later, that you have to pay for your mistakes and so you are better off not making any, if you can avoid it. I mean over and over again, we are going to see that if President Bush had to live the same kind of life you and I live, well, he sure wouldn't be president.

Like Ms. Walsh says, "if your life worked out this dang well, you might wanna run for president, too."