RichardH just posted the following as a comment to the original post below the green line:

Remarks by the President on Strengthening Intelligence and Aviation Security 7 January 2010.

The President is far more eloquent than I could ever be in explaining what he is doing. That is why I want to elevate Richard’s post to here. I don’t want you to miss this link because it was buried in a comment.

Follow this link to the story on the McClatchy News web site about President Obama’s response to the December 25th airplane bombing attempt..

What a novel concept – the person in charge takes responsibility.

He doesn’t ask for major new intrusive and unconstitutional powers. He does not ask for more data to drown the data we already have. He analyzes the problem and takes the steps that an executive has the power to take to fix the problem. He also doesn’t make some underling take the fall for a failure of the system.

He didn’t even have to go to Harvard Business School to learn this. If I were still in the work force, I sure know which President I would prefer to work for.

Think about this.  If you are an employee and you see that heads don’t roll when you give your boss an honest assessment of what went wrong, are you likely to be open and honest with your boss in the future?  On the other hand, if you see that someone gets fired when something goes wrong, are you likely to spend your time to deflect blame on some other patsy the next time something goes wrong.  Which is more productive to fixing problems, honest assessments of what to fix or massive efforts at blame shifting?

Let me see if I have this straight, the President who ignored the pleadings of his subordinates and allowed the killing of nearly 3,000 people and billions of dollars of destruction got elected to a second term.  The President whose administration has thwarted many such attempts in his short tenure and who takes immediate responsibility for an attempt that got way too close to success is supposedly in trouble electorally.