The Audacity of Privelege

In my earliest years in school I generally detested writing.  In high school, English and anything relating to its use were always the areas in which I struggled the most to succeed.  I scored very well in entrance exams but English/writing lagged those scores dramatically.  Over the course of 30 plus years, including post-secondary education, certifications and especially vocational demands that I improve I suppose I've become "better" yet hardly great, writer.  I still struggle to translate the thoughts I see so clearly in my mind into words on a page.   I suppose that's the challenge most all of us feel when we write.  It is maddening.  My solution has too often been simply to throw more words at the idea in a Dennis Leary style stream of consciousness which occasionally results in successful expression, whether through sheer volume or haphazardly stumbling on the right syntactic combination.  Yet, those occasions are too infrequent, at least for me.  Too rarely is the synthesis concise, too rarely is it clear to the point of easy understanding.  Would that it were.
By contrast, sometimes we engage in conversation, in writing or in person, which is unclear on purpose.  Sometimes we want to argue both sides, sometimes we don't want to be held accountable to an answer and so we demure, and if we cannot demure, we dissemble saying things which are opaque, which perhaps could be construed to mean one thing or another.  It's not honest but it gives us safety because it gives us an out.  We recognize, though, that honorable people do it less often than those we look upon as being "dishonest" for doing so.  Yet, let's be fair, in truth we all do it, even if it's only in an argument with our spouse where we don't want to "lose."  With our children, if we are to be our "son's first hero and daughter's first love", we do it rarely or the bloom will come off the rose much earlier than later. Kids of a certain age, after all, are black and white about honesty.  They see through obfuscation quite simply because they don't understand it.  So, in evaluation we have to admit that dissembling isn't something we admire nor is it something to which we should aspire to engage in.  It's kissing cousins to sophistry, it's lying in a subtle way, but it is lying.
My education was relatively pedestrian.  I attended a very good, but entirely public set of schools up until the last school I attended and from which I received my degree (including Iowa State, the University of Minnesota and Hennepin Technical College for a class on COBOL).  I was a top student but hardly a top student at an Ivy League school.  My education wasn't at Oxford, I didn't learn to be so eloquent and clear in my expression that my words are going to go down in history as profound.  My insight, profound or otherwise, will be remembered by my children and maybe theirs and darned few others almost certainly.
So how then do we evaluate presidential candidates?  The reality in the United States is that we have darned few candidates who didn't come from a privileged background or who, like President Obama, didn't attend a top tier school.  They were steeped in an education which carried a requirement to speak and write well, to speak and write with purpose.  Furthermore, to be successful in business I can speak with some authority that clear communication is an absolute requirement.  Lack of clarity, especially by a leader, leads only to chaos and uncertainty.  It leads to subordinate leadership engaging in disparate and dysfunctional strategies which too often will conflict and then require that first leader to step-in rectify the situation they caused.  It leads to inefficiency and it leads to failure.  I've managed dozens of projects over the years and I will say that the two most common points of failure in a project relate to a lack of support from leadership and/or a lack of ability by that leadership to make a clear decision and enforce it.  No organization I've ever worked within which had a leader who didn't provide a clear vision and engage in open and honest dialog with his/her senior team was anything like as successful as those which were clearly lead by someone with a strong ability to set a vision and to do so with integrity and honestly.  Repeated articles by CEO's name clear communication and integrity as the two greatest keys to their own success, so if you don't want to take my word for it, take theirs.  As a corollary, I can say without question that my writing is far better now than it was when I was in high school or even in college 30(ish) years ago.  I had to learn to be better.  I've become a bit pedantic about things.  I bristle ever so slightly when I see myself write a sentence which ends with a participle or hear someone say "where are you at?"  It's a 180 degree change from the person I was, necessitated and brought about by the realization that to succeed I had to learn to convey my thoughts clearly.
So, with that as a backdrop, how should we evaluate a presidential candidate who has made a habit of speaking only in generalities, in making really virtually no policy statements which he or she could not point to some other statement they made and say, 'No, no, I said I was this not that" despite having a clear quote that they did support the that?  Even more, how do we evaluate a candidate whose words are such a jumble of incoherent incomplete sentences that it's difficult to very much know what he or she meant or would do?  What should we think of someone who clearly was trained to be speak and write properly.
Donald J Trump attended some of the top schools in the United States.  He attended the New York Military School, a private preparatory boarding school (not West Point, let's be clear).  He then started at Fordham University but transferred to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts, majoring in  Economics.  I work in financial services, that school, Wharton, is considered top 3 at worst in Economics.  I have to assume Mr. Trump was required while at that school to express his thoughts concisely and clearly.  In fact, having had some education in economics, I can say with certainty that there are concepts n economics about which you must express your understanding very clearly, very unambiguously, or you simply could not pass that course and further that there are several of those kinds of courses in that discipline required to receive such a degree.  Furthermore, to receive a Bachelor of Arts, a degree which requires training in humanities more so than a Bachelor of Science would require, I have to guess with a good degree of certainty that Mr. Trump had to express himself in complete sentences, had to take a position and defend it.
Over the past 12 years and more Mr. Trump has weighed in on various political topics despite claiming to "not be a politician prior to 6 months ago", which is in itself a lie since he obviously ran for the Presidency in 2012.  He has done so using language which was vague to the point of meaningless in most cases, speaking in broken sentences.  I doubt he is unaware that such a manner is at best the worst way to communicate his ideas clearly.  I'm sure he was instructed in rhetorical structure, so I have to assume he knows his method of discussion is opaque and combative.  At the same time he also has made comments which were unbelievably offensive, which gave the appearance of standing for something extreme.  Yet, very often, he then would go on later, maybe even in the same interview, to make a statement which allowed him to claim he didn't mean it or didn't say it.  Mr. Trump is clearly a clever and bright man, I have to believe he knows he said both things, or the earlier thing, yet he will go on to say he didn't say one or the other, whenever it suits him.  He has to know this is dissembling, he has to know it's a lie.  And I have to wonder how he possibly succeeded leading his organizations this way.  He knows HOW to communicate clearly or he'd have never graduated from Wharton, did he unlearn that over the last 40 years?  I doubt it very much.  So the question has to be, why does he do it if it cannot work in business for him?  Why does he do it unless he simply feels his base is too foolish or too blindered to actually check up on him?  Is it the arrogance of privilege or simply the arrogance of Trump himself?  If you think that's an unfair statement, please read on.  Mr. Trump's audacity is incredible, just in this one story, but that's my opinion, judge for yourself.
I offer one point, one of dozens which far better writers than me have used to chronicle Mr. Trump's fatuous self-aggrandizing pomposity, but it does speak volumes about this man's readiness to be our commander-in-chief.  If you don't like Trump because he's made openly bigoted statements, good and you shouldn't.  But if you like Trump because you think he "tells it like it is" and sticks to his guns, read the following and then try to reconcile this example against your feelings.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/in-2002-donald-trump-said-he-supported-invading-iraq-on-the#.iwwG3M3qA
Mr. Trump said three things.  First, in 2002 he said we should invade Iraq.  In early 2003 he said if wee were going to do so we should simply do or... not do so.. but stop equivocating.  He also said Bush was doing a "great job", a statement he later contradicted by saying the administration did a terrible job.  In later 2003 he said going into Iraq was a mistake, but only after the insurgency had begun in earnest and it wasn't the cake-walk others predicted, presumably including Trump himself by saying we should go in 2002.  Now he says he said we shouldn't have gone in, he "slips" and says he said "Don't go" implying he said it before the war started when he didn't.  What he means is he said "you shouldn't have gone" but he was hardly the only one saying that in the late summer of 2003, so were many MANY Democrats, and many others were questioning our actions when our forces failed to find any active WMD programs and/or large caches of usable WMD munitions.  Trump was convinced, like Bush, that we should invade in 2002.  He did what he always does (now) and spoke out of both sides of his mouth in early 2003 so that he could claim he wasn't fully on board, and then finally in later 2003 said it was wrong and "he said so first."  That is hardly true, and worse, is fully dishonest about his position before the invasion.
He now constantly claims to "have been right about Iraq."  Well, if by "right" he means eventually, just like nearly everyone else (other than the neo-con hawks who STILL think Iraq was a good idea).  He clearly wasn't right when it mattered, he clearly wasn't right at the time.  He wants to re-write his own history, let alone history.  He knows he's doing so, he's smart enough to recall what else he said. He was not prescient, he was not strong, he flip-flopped on one of the most important foreign policy actions of the modern age with respect to the United States.  He's no great military mind, he's no strong leader, and worst of all, he speaks in riddles so that he can claim to have been for something before he was against it or against it despite being for it.  Yet, it seems pretty obvious that he thinks he can get away with it.  It seems he thinks what he said wasn't recorded when in fact, as a public person, it was and can be EASILY found.  I found this article in 10 seconds.  So, if you like the bombastic hate-baiting speech and think it reflects strength, well, that's your thing I guess. But if you think that's the conduct of a strong leader, you're dead wrong, and you're lying to yourself no less than "the Donald" is lying to you.  Even a child can see it, why can't you?