Metaphor for Taking A Job for Granted

The SG blogs and the student newspaper at my alma mater are all atwitter over two SG officials being allowed to keep their jobs while pretending they can do their work from another location a thousand miles away.

The first case, Treasurer Paul Drayton, was trying to claim he could fulfill a constitutional role by fax and phone while maintaining a Wall Street internship that he claimed made him work 10 hour days. That was simply not credible, and got him into a lot of hot water – so much so that he made a big show of getting himself put on speaker phone to defend against an impeachment proceeding that never happened.

And now, as this cartoon suggests, SG has just appointed someone to run their voter registration drive who will be in DC for the summer and won’t be here for 2 of the 3 remaining months before the registration deadline. What’s the point of doing that?

I’ll just remind you that SG has a history of deciding which fraternity or which individual gets a job, often months or even a year or two in advance, and then squaring the peg when it comes time to giving them the job that’s been promised.

It’s a perfect metaphor for taking a job and a democracy for granted. People in all levels of government do this. From the Florida Republicans who are planning who will be state House Speaker four or six years from now to those Washington Democrats who are eyeing potential Senate Appropriations Chairmen for when Byrd steps down.

Why can’t folks in power focus on doing their jobs well and not worrying about who gets credit? Why can’t they let those who show up to do the job have the titles that go with it? And surely out of a student body of 50,000 and a Greek-letter community of 5,000, my alma mater could find someone – anyone at all – to run the voter registration drive who wasn’t in DC for the summer.