The definition of the term “Crisis Management” is just as it sounds: the ability of a leader to react appropriately to a crisis situation. Regarding America’s looming plunge over the Fiscal Cliff, however,   Political One-Upmanship is ruling the day, as the President Obama and Congress pose for the cameras, and, in less-than-good-faith, negotiate a deal regarding the biggest tax hike in U.S. History.

ABCNews.go.com has the story:

Political brinkmanship appears to have created a last minute chance for the White House and Congress to agree on a plan to avoid sending the country over the fiscal cliff.

President Obama emerged from an Oval Office meeting with Congressional leaders this evening to say “we had a constructive meeting today” and that he was “moderately optimistic” that they could devise a federal budget proposal ahead of a Jan. 1 deadline that would otherwise automatically trigger a wide range of tax increases and spending cuts. Economists fear that such a combination could throw the country back into a recession.

He said Senate Majority Leader Harry, a Democrat, and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican, were trying to quickly fashion a deal.

“Sens. Reid and McConnell are discussing a potential agreement where we can get a bipartisan bill out of the Senate and over to the House in a timely fashion so that we meet the Dec. 31 deadline,” Obama said in a hastily-arranged statement. “But given how things have been working in this town we always have to wait and see to see whether it actually happens.”

Admitting the weekend could ultimately prove fruitless, the president said as a backup plan he had instructed Reid to deliver the Democratic proposal to the Senate floor for a straight up-or-down vote. That would boost taxes for couples making more than $250,000.

“I believe such a proposal could pass both houses with bipartisan majorities as long as those leaders allow it to actually come to a vote,” Obama said. “If members of the House or the Senate want to vote no, they can, but we should let everybody vote. That’s the way this is supposed to work. If you can get a majority in the House and you can get a majority in the Senate, then we should be able to pass a bill.”

The president lamented that a deal is coming down to the final hours.

“The American people are watching what we do… (their) patience is already thin,” the president said. “It’s deja vu all over again.”

He added later that for Americans the repeated last second efforts to dodge economic crises “is mind boggling to them. It has to stop.”

Translation: You Redneck Congresscritters representing the Bitter Clingers better do it my way or I’ll throw a Hissy Fit!

And, as Grover Norquist reminds us: that ain’t exactly the best solution.

As the “fiscal cliff” of tax hikes and spending cuts draws closer, anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist repeated his call on CNBC’s “Closing Bell”for spending cuts instead of tax increases to deal with the country’s fiscal problems.

“If you put tax increases on the table, there’s never any spending restraint,” Norquist said, citing examples where taxes went up under previous administrations but spending continued unfettered.

“All Obama has done for the last four years is clamor for higher taxes to spend more money,” the president of Americans for Tax Reform told CNBC. “The only time we’ve beat him back on spending at all was during the debt-ceiling crisis.”

Norquist said Obama was “willing to save $1 trillion by not occupying Iraq for the next decade. He wanted to count that like not continuing the War of 1812 was his budget cut.”

He added that raising taxes isn’t a compromise because the problem is spending.

He also called on the Senate to pass a budget, which it has failed to do for years. “Then we could compare it to the Republican budget and perhaps we could compromise on how much spending we need to bring down,” Norquist said.

When we get past the cliff, any hike in the debt ceiling should be accompanied by similar cuts in spending, Norquist said.

“[Speaker John] Boehner and Sen. Mitch McConnell have made clear if the president wants a dollar of debt-ceiling increase, we need to cut spending a dollar. That goes for $1 trillion,” Norquist said. “That kind of spending restraint is exactly the kind of thing we need to do in the future for any debt-ceiling increase —period.”

Just as there are different general Management styles, there are different styles of Crisis Management: altruistic and self-serving.

What Obama and our Congresscritters are attempting to do, is come up with some sort of last-minute whoop-te-do stop-gap measure, in a feverish attempt to stave off the consequences of being bad stewards of our money.

With President Barack Hussein Obama (mm mmm mmmm) leading the way.

The whole situation reminds me of a Director, whom I reported to, when I was working as a Media Specialist at one of the country’s largest and most prestigious hospitals. This lady, (an Ed.D.) would wait until the Ninth Hour, as the deadline for a major project for her superiors approached, and then she would turn the office upside-down, in a scene reminiscent of the pie fight scene in the Tony Curtis/Peter Falk Classic, “The Great Race”.

The conference room table would be stacked with all her paperwork, while our two Admins flew wildly around, attempting to organize her mess,  like their hair was on fire and their rear ends were catching.  Meanwhile, my manager would be conspicuously gone from the general vicinity all day, leaving the rest of us at the mercy of the dear lady.

The president, like my former director, seems to be relishing the power he holds during the chaos of these Ninth-Hour Negotiations.

Which just proves the old chestnut:

If you can keep your head, while those around you are losing theirs…then you obviously don’t have a clue as to what is going on.

Until He Comes,

KJ