The Carpetbagger Report quotes from Lee Iacocca’s upcoming book to note that Iacocca’s views on George Bush have really changed since he supported him in 2000. Before getting into that, we should remember that by 2004 Iacocca had realized the faults in George Bush and endorsed John Kerry:
Iacocca backs Kerry
By Jody Wilgoren
New York Times News Service
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Pitching his plans for the new economy, Sen. John Kerry was embraced on Thursday by an icon of the old, Lee A. Iacocca, the former chairman of the Chrysler Corp.
Iacocca, an outspoken supporter of President Bush’s in the 2000 election, said he was endorsing Kerry this year because “the bottom line is simple: We need a new CEO and a new president.”
“All of my best friends are Republicans,” Iacocca said as he introduced Kerry, the presumed Democratic nominee, for a speech on technology at San Jose State University, “and they ask me, ‘Are you crazy or something? Why are you doing this?’ I tell them the world is changing, our country is changing, and we need a leader who will understand that change taking place.”
Iacocca appeared in campaign commercials and on the stump for Bush in 2000 in Michigan, a state the Democrats ended up winning by 5 percent. Noting that his first ballot was cast for Harry S. Truman and that he had been “friendly with every president since Lyndon Johnson,” Iacocca, 79, said his decision to endorse Kerry was made “not as a partisan but as an unabashed patriot.”
He plans to campaign actively this fall in Michigan, Ohio and his native Pennsylvania.
Kerry, for his part, praised Iacocca as “a man of common sense” and said that “the Chrysler minivan has been the vehicle of success in winning my elections.”
Nowadays, of course, the company Iacocca built is the German-owned DaimlerChrysler. And Kerry is ferried to and fro in black Chevrolet Suburbans driven by Secret Service agents.
This makes the views Iacocca expresses in his upcoming book, Where Have All The Leaders Gone, less surprising. Iacocca writes that, “We’ve got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we’ve got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can’t even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car.”
Iacocca complains that we voted for people who say to “stay the course” but also says what we didn’t vote for. “We didn’t agree to suspend the Constitution. We didn’t agree to stop asking questions or demanding answers. Some of us are sick and tired of people who call free speech treason. Where I come from that’s a dictatorship, not a democracy.”
Iacocca blasts Bush for failing to show key characteristics of a leader, starting with curiosity:
A leader has to show CURIOSITY. He has to listen to people outside of the “Yes, sir” crowd in his inner circle. He has to read voraciously, because the world is a big, complicated place. George W. Bush brags about never reading a newspaper. “I just scan the headlines,” he says. Am I hearing this right? He’s the President of the United States and he never reads a newspaper? Thomas Jefferson once said, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter.”
Iaccoc continues this “C List” with a look at creativity, ability to communicate, character, courage, conviction, charisma, competence, and common sense, finding Bush failing . Discussing conviction, he writes, “Bush has set the all-time record for number of vacation days taken by a U.S. President—four hundred and counting. He’d rather clear brush on his ranch than immerse himself in the business of governing. He even told an interviewer that the high point of his presidency so far was catching a seven-and-a-half-pound perch in his hand-stocked lake.” Then Iacocca looks at his ability to handle a crisis after the 9/11 attacks:
That was George Bush’s moment of truth, and he was paralyzed. And what did he do when he’d regained his composure? He led us down the road to Iraq—a road his own father had considered disastrous when he was President. But Bush didn’t listen to Daddy. He listened to a higher father. He prides himself on being faith based, not reality based. If that doesn’t scare the crap out of you, I don’t know what will.
A longer excerpt from his book is under the fold.
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