Top Brass Measuring Up Obama (and talking about it)

The Washington Post reports:

Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, went unarmed into his first meeting with the new commander in chief -- no aides, no PowerPoint presentation, no briefing books. Summoned nine days ago to President-elect Barack Obama's Chicago transition office, Mullen showed up with only a pad, a pen and a desire to take the measure of his incoming boss.

Sounds reasonable enough. We all measure up a new boss, hoping to get a sense for how smart they are, how you'll get along, and frankly, whether or not they deserve to be your boss. But how many of us feel comfortable publicizing our impressions? How appropriate is it to stand around the water cooler and speak loudly and boldly about how good or bad the new CEO is? Probably not a good idea. Would you go on TV or speak to reporters? No again, right? It's simply not good employee citizenship.

Now imagine that your job dealt with matters of life and death and that your new boss was in charge of telling you, let's be honest folks, who to kill, how and where. Imagine the profound importance of your real and perceived relationship with that new boss. The utmost care must be put into ensuring things go smoothly and that everyone knows their place, the chain of command is without question. Not doing so puts people and property in real risk of injury, destruction, or death. Now let me ask the same question. How appropriate would it be in this case to publicize your impression of the new boss? Probably not so much, I'd say.

Nevertheless, as the article goes on to explain, some very top people in the military are flagrantly and very publicly passing judgment on Obama. While their comments tend to be generally positive, I can't help but wonder if such open verdicts are not completely out of place and, I'll use the word again, entirely inappropriate. Besides the issue of politeness (you wouldn't do it about your own boss even at McDonald's) and the stakes (we're talking about a job that entails protecting and killing potentially large numbers of people here), there is the matter of degrees of superiority. The divide that separates a corporate CEO and a line worker is big, indeed, but qualitatively, it pails in comparison to that which separates a commander-in-chief and an Army or Marine general. I believe that they have no place whatsoever, at least not in their capacity as military personnel, commenting publicly about their impressions of the new president's intellect, personality, or predisposition. It's simply not their place.

The reasons such comments are deemed okay, I believe, is that there is a bias that Democratic presidents are impotent wimps who either loath the military or don't know what to do with it. I wonder if the top brass passed judgment on Bush the same way? My guess is that they did not.

But what do you think? Thanks for commenting.