KICK BUTT AND TAKE NAMES. Lee at Right Thinking from the Left Coast has been thinking about the responsibility for the failure of emergency management efforts in the last week.

The head of a corporation is called its CEO, the Chief Executive Officer. The CEO’s job does not require that he actually know anything about the type of product the corporation produces. For example, take a software company. The CEO’s job is to run the company, and he leaves the actual creation of software products to his vice presidents, engineers and marketing people, who he hires.

The president of the United States is really nothing more than our national CEO. His job is to make sure things get done, and in this regard he is authorized to hire people to whom he delegates the specific authority to pursue the president’s agenda. This is why we have cabinet secretaries and heads of departments and all of the other people who make up the executive branch of our government. They report to the president. The head of FEMA, for example, is one such appointee.

In a corporation, when a subordinate is discovered to have committed some kind of malfeasance, or is revealed to be grossly incompetent for the job at hand, the CEO is faced with a decision. One option is to immediately fire the employee .... The other option is to keep him around and weather the criticism for doing so.

To an extent, the "CEO" metaphor fails. The national government has taken much of the responsibility for disaster relief unto itself (with consequences I wish to explore in a future post.) Presumably part of a President's agenda is ensuring that the disaster relief will be carried out expeditiously. The States, however, are not wholly-owned subsidiaries (Congressional bundling of transportation money with drinking ages and speed limits notwithstanding) and those States, and their counties and cities have some freedom of action. That makes it less likely a President, even one with a Harvard MBA, can go to the morning meeting and "expect" results.
That a CEO can safeguard the interests of the company's owners without actually knowing "anything about the type of product the corporation produces" is also a bit of a stretch. Although the railroads took a bit of stick during the 1950s and 1960s for continuing to promote section hands to chairman of the board, after stints in the engineering or mechanical or rate department along the way, the professional-manager types brought in from other sorts of businesses tended not to acquit themselves very well. Companies, the six-dollar "succeed in business" paperbacks at the airport bookseller notwithstanding, are not homogeneous dollar machines.

The poster's conclusion, however, is correct. In a constitutional republic, the voters do have the responsibility of voting out of office those officials that fail to assume responsibility.