Being Dead Right in Politics or in Business is Not a Good Thing

This posting is a departure from what I usually write about on this site. Today, I’m using my sharp pencil to highlight three leaders of democracies that are “dead right.” What does dead right mean? It means being on the right side of an issue but through actions or personal circumstances being the wrong person to lead. Who are these “dead right” leaders?

Justin Trudeau

I will start with the one most blog readers would be unfamiliar with unless you’re Canadian that is and know the name of our Prime Minister. His father Pierre Trudeau was Prime Minister, and the son has followed in his footsteps with three terms in office.

Where Pierre Trudeau bowed out of politics on a snowy February 29th evening, his son has yet to take the hint that it is his time to leave. Justin Trudeau is a classic example of being dead right; right on social policy, right on environmental policy, but not right in timing his departure.

Trudeau has implemented carbon pricing and stuck with the program that will in future years be seen as landing on the right side of history. Trudeau has made efforts to reconcile the country’s colonial history with its Indigenous population, also the right thing to do. He has instituted programs and policies like national pharmacare, dental care, childcare, and urban housing initiatives. He has bought a moribund pipeline company and completed the project to rescue landlocked oil sands operations to get their products to market, and done this despite it countering his stated goal to decarbonize the country’s economy to mitigate climate change.

It doesn’t matter that he has done all of the above because one thing he is not doing has made him dead right. He has overstayed his welcome after nine years in charge. Canadians in poll after poll see him as the problem. He doesn’t and that’s the definition of being dead right. He needs to resign as Prime Minister. A by-election this week in a Liberal bellwether riding in Toronto, a bastion for the federal political party could persuade him to go. By doing this he may save all the policies and initiatives he instituted from going down with him in a federal election expected a year from now.

Benjamin Netanyahu

Second on our list is Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s embattled Prime Minister. Netanyahu is not an easy man to like. By staying in office he has avoided corruption charges for accepting gifts from foreign entities.

In my opinion, he has been on the wrong side of issues more than being on the right. In the latest election, to return to the prime minister’s office, he brought extremist parties into his government.

His surreptitious policy of supporting payments to Hamas in Gaza for years, with Dubai being the middleman, has kept them in power while continuing to separate Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza from establishing a united front. The money has served Hamas well, politically and militarily. No doubt this money helped to buy the weapons used on October 7th and continues to help it in spreading knowledge of its victimhood all over the Internet.

Post the October 7th, 2023 raid into Israel, Netanyahu has vowed revenge on Hamas. Most Israelis at the time agreed. Most people around the world detested what Hamas did on that day. Hamas still holds more than one hundred Israelis hostage and scores of bodies of those they captured or killed that day or who have subsequently died as captives.

Netanyahu has avenged the Gaza attack ten times turning Israel’s victimhood into the opposite in the view of many around the world. In swearing to wipe out Hamas and put the Gaza Strip and its people under Israeli military control, Netanyahu has instituted a policy bound to fail. Netanyahu’s revenge may seem right to him but it is a policy that is dead right. He has overstayed his welcome. If he cannot be pushed from office by the members of his cabinet, by the mass protests in Israel happening every weekend, then the Knesset’s members need to vote and replace him.

The longer Netanyahu remains in power, the less likely Israel and Palestine will find a peaceful resolution to a land dispute that has gone on for more than a century with origins in World War One and the Balfour Declaration.

Joe Biden

The third on my list of leaders who are dead right is Joe Biden, President of the United States. When first elected Biden stated he would be a one-term President. As a one-term president, he would reverse the course set by the worst impulses of his predecessor, Donald Trump.

His progressive agenda on climate has made him an environmental champion. He is reindustrializing the American heartland. He has expanded the public health mandate. He has rallied Western democracies to help Ukraine in fighting Russia’s war of aggression.

He has largely stayed away from condemning the actions of the previous administration, and the attempt by Trump and his minions to overthrow election results.

What he hasn’t done is stay younger than his 81 years now show. He has noticeably aged in office and despite having done so much right, in running again, he is dead right. By staying on he may end up with the one result he doesn’t want, the return of Donald Trump to the presidency.

My U.S. friend who recently became a Canadian citizen, when asked if there would be any more elections for President if Trump is returned in November said: “Not while Trump is still alive.”

To not be dead right, Biden can still name a successor from the ranks of the Democratic Party or a prominent independent before or at the upcoming convention. It will cause a political earthquake but the shockwave may bring Trump tumbling down and prevent what could turn into a disaster for America.

Being Dead Right Has Consequences

I first came across the concept of “dead right” while working for a very large U.S. high-technology company. We were in the middle of a hostile takeover of a prominent competitor. We succeeded but those in the acquired company were unhappy. In a parting shot, the former CEO talked about our company leaders as being dead right. He said there would be consequences and he was right. Scrutiny by the Securities and Exchange Commission of both the takeover and my company’s financial reporting unleashed a scandal and charges being laid against our management with several ending up in jail. I had long departed before all of that came home to roost but the phrase “dead right” remained with me.

The meeting of the G7 leaders ended this week and some of them on display will soon find themselves equally dead right. Add Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, as one, and Emmanuel Macron, the President of France as another.  It seems being dead right is a virus and transmissible when it comes to world politics.

Dead right may soon reappear in the technology world as the industry goes nuts over artificial intelligence (AI). In the last week, Apple jumped into the AI arms race with Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Amazon and others. Each tech behemoth is trying to outflank the other with AI algorithms that train on billions of pages of unstructured data scraped from the Internet with little thought or rationale beyond keeping ahead of the competition to be first to create artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Without guardrails, one or more of these decision-makers will prove to be dead right when AGI makes humanity that much poorer and increasingly dependent on algorithms as substitutes for human intelligence and creativity. These tech giant enablers will make money for shareholders in the short term. But we will all suffer in the end. To me, those who lead us down this path will obtain the ultimate “dead right” prize.