you found out there’s some serious structural damage in your house, and you need to hire a contractor. You’ve narrowed it down to two — one who is well known in town and another who has experience dealing with the issue.
So you’re interviewing the well-known local, asking him how he can fix the problem, but all he can talk about is the other contractor. The other contractor says she’s Jewish! “So?” you ask. “She got jobs working for the Jewish Community that she wasn’t entitled to, because she’s not really Jewish!”
“Do you have proof of this?”
“No, but look at her! You can see that she’s not.”
“OK, but can you tell me how you can fix our problem?”
But the guy doesn’t want to talk about details of his past work, or specifics of how he’d repair your home. He spends more time saying nasty things about the other contractor. You heard that he works with some subcontractors with a bad reputation, some group called McConnell & Friends. But when you ask him about it, he says that’s not important. “You’re not hiring the subcontractors!” he says. “You’re hiring me!”
Is this the guy you want fixing your home?
For all the Rebublican talk about how government should be run more like industry, I’ve never been part of a hiring process in the private sector where job candidates got ahead in the process by trying to crap all over another candidate instead of telling about their own achievements.
We’ve got some serious problems to be fixed in this country, and we are now in the job interview process for United States Senator. One candidate has some great experience helping to fix a big problem, being the driving force behind creating the Consumer Financial Protection Board. The other candidate doesn’t seem to want to talk about many specifics of what he did or what he’ll do, except to say that he works well with others, yet he spends much of his interview time criticizing his competitor. He won’t refuse to support putting other senators in power who will be terrible for the country.That’s not who I’d hire to do a job in my home, and it’s certainly not who I am supporting to be my next Senator.
It won’t change any minds among the hard-c0re right, but it should convince a lot of middle-of-the-road folks.
I love your analogy.
I would make one edit. The well-known local is a sub-contractor to McConnell & Friends, not the other way around. They control his schedule, his suppliers, and manage his collections.
Their reputation is bad because they and their contractors just burned down the ENTIRE downtown historic district (the major revenue generator for the town). They had a sweetheart deal with the former mayor (he was a long-time family friend of Mr. McConnell), and their plumbers disregarded decades of law and common practice about using torches inside historic structures. They had persuaded the mayor to disconnect all the water mains and remove all the fire hydrants in the name of “convenience” (“we don’t need these, they haven’t been used in YEARS!”). They’ve been in the news because they’re hiring thugs to harass and throw bricks at the workers hired by the new mayor (elected after the historic conflagration) who are laboriously struggling to rebuild the historic district. They’ve been caught vandalizing the newly-constructed replacement buildings, and their owner (Mr. McConnell) has sworn to destroy the political career of the new mayor.
The well-known local tells you you’re hiring him, but the bottom line is that the contract you sign will be with McConnell & Friends, and your checks will be made payable to THEM.
the leaking roof or buckling walls or termites or whatever other nightmare scenario you want to imagine may be too obsessed with the immediate emergency (job loss, underemployment that can’t pay all the bills) to worry about anything else. Even in my original scenario, subcontractors do matter a lot — on a big construction job, they may end up doing most of the important work while the contractor is the face of the operation to the customer.
This fantasy has become far too real for me.