Bill,
With all my heart I hope you are right that Obama will be a man that will publically demonstrate the metacognitive skills that a mature, caring, intelligent adult utilizes in attempting to improve him/herself, and will thus serve as a role model for others; that is to say, as you said, admit and expose the mistakes, discuss how and why they were made, be proactive in avoiding them and their confounded relatives in the future.
Let people see you don't have to have the answer the first time--if you're willing to admit you're wrong. Demonstrate to young Americans that mistakes are absolutely essential; that the novel started with a very faulty draft; that if you're not making mistakes, you're not learning. And if you're not acknowledging and correcting your mistakes, you're dead or lying, and in the case of some, murdering.
If Obama turns out to be That Man, I will regret having left America, for that will be a turning point...
Lee
]
We're channelling 
This was written several days ago:
This Sunday, January 11, 2009, Frank Rich of the New York Times wrote a column detailing the financial and ethical disasters of the Bush Administration and the continued lack of outrage in our society. It’s worth reading and you can find it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/opinion/11rich.html
The lack of response from the public to the escalating drumbeat of everything from incompetence to calculated fraud has been puzzling to many. Those of us who are boomers have the impulse to point out that we know how to channel disgust with our government. We expressed public outrage in march after march in the 70’s and like to claim some credit for driving a President from office and shedding light on the chicanery of the day. But that enthusiasm for the truth didn’t last very long. We all embraced the escalating inflation of the currency and the easy credit that have only recently been exposed as one of the greatest Ponzi schemes of all time.
The Palestinians and the Israelis are demonstrating in Manhattan today but there are no rallies, there are no marches protesting the massive destruction of our economic life and our global credibility. People are loosing their homes on a daily basis and there is still no credible plan to stop that from happening. I could go on to list more tragedy - from our educational system to healthcare and on and one. So what has happened to us? Why is it that we don’t seem to be moved by what is happening to our fellow man and increasingly to each and every one of us.
I don’t watch much television any more but someone dropped a free copy of the Daily News on our doorstep a few days ago and it contained a television guide. As I looked through it I was reminded about my reaction to Donald Trump’s show, The Apprentice when it debuted in 2004. After nearly 35 years spent in the effort of facilitating cooperation within a number of enterprises I was dismayed that the “winner” of this show was the person who was most successful in beating all of the other contestants by any means necessary. And so it goes with most of these shows. We have mothers who trade families, nannies who encounter seemingly brain dead parents, a dozen people who expose themselves to 24 hour surveillance in an effort to win a half a million dollars, a half a dozen judges who settle disputes that a group of three year olds could resolve; the list seems endless. These shows are described as “reality” and perhaps more upsetting, “entertainment”.
My hands are not clean either. I have failed to stop some members of my family from watching 25 hookers compete for the hand in marriage of a seemingly demented man who apparently has a substantial amount of money. Well, that’s what it seems to me to be going on.
We have numbed ourselves as a nation. The producers of these shows must be desperate. How can they possibly top what they have already done? How can they produce even more human beings willing to expose themselves, emotionally and now increasingly physically to a mass audience? But they seem to manage.
Perhaps the only saving grace is that fewer and fewer people are watching network television. It is likely in five years time there will be little of it left. The medium itself could be very useful in communicating to the public but that potential is rarely utilized – perhaps that is about to change.
We are all about to get a wake-up call. For the first time since JFK we have a President coming into office who is telling us that we are all going to have to make sacrifices – we are all going to have “skin in the game”. That’s a big change from being told to go out and shop. Some of us may not like it, but I have a feeling that most of us will. It might feel good to actually pitch in help each other rather than watching each other as though we are zoo animals.
Mr. Rich quotes Dawn Johnson, the new head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice as saying that we must “resist Bush administration efforts to hide evidence of its wrongdoing through demands for retroactive immunity, assertions of state privilege, and implausible claims that openness will empower terrorists.” Perhaps we will all support her from the perspective that the destructiveness of the Bush era offends us as Americans. Outrage has become too transitory an emotion. We need to operate from a set of principles that result in justice instead of retribution.
There’s also something else that might be on the horizon. Barack Obama is going to make some mistakes; some of the people in his administration are going to make some mistakes. It is just possible that we have a President who will acknowledge those mistakes, describe what he has learned from them and how they have altered his thought process going forward. Perhaps that kind of reality is something that we all will not only want to watch but actually participate in.