There is a minimum skills set that is required of the Commander-in-Chief and it involves making decisions of life and death in real and often hurried time, decisions about protecting America and its troops.
Long before the Afghanistan debacle many doubted President Biden’s ability to correctly make those decisions, including former Secretary of Defense Gates. Vice President Harris never gave a single interview in which she even attempted to demonstrate the skills set required which begins with thinking and talking on your feet even if only to filibuster effectively or provide cover for ongoing sidebar or secret negotiations.
The second skills set are the varied abilities required to assemble a team of 3,000 or more people to join you in the administration. Not surprisingly President Donald Trump’s first time as a ‘president-elect’ had its share of ‘swings-and-misses’ on personnel because he’d never been a politician, had no large, lifelong cadre of political and government professionals on which to draw for guidance and support.
As a private sector, private company developer, the former and future president knew land development and television, and the promotional talents to succeed at both. His early success in Manhattan development branched out to his casinos and luxury golf course properties and far from New York City, but that successful set of developments included a standard number of projects that didn’t work out and went bust. Developers—I represented many large developers, both public and private, when I practiced law from 1989 to 2016—are all alike in some crucial ways, and none of them escaped recessions and the vagaries of the business. They are not at all risk averse and they are very much learning machines but not of the bookish sort. ‘Cut and fill’ to ‘balance’ a development site and ‘units per acre’ are among the many terms of art in the business of residential planned community land and leisure development, but not many people make the jump from that to elected politics. The skills cross-over is limited.
