Obama, McCain, Bailout and Real Leadership

Keep your fingers crossed that McCain and Obama stay as far away from the US Senate as possible as the bailout is negotiated over the next few days. Whatever their intentions, all they can do is poison the well by intruding Presidential politics into the mix. A smidgeon of leadership on their part would be resisting the temptation to use the economic troubles as a campaign boost. Stay on the hustings, and continue the pandering, please. And there's Bill Clinton, praising John McCain, continuing to do whatever he can just this side of indecency to make sure that Obama is not occupying the White House in 2012, when Hillary will rise again. Check out the NY1 piece: http://www.ny1.com/content/top_stories/Default.aspx?ArID=86269. Then again, for real leadership, think about the folks I spent the day with today: 11 principles of charter schools in New York City. They put their careers on the line by taking those anti-establishment jobs in the first place. Their political support is fragile, depending on unholy alliances between the likes of libertarian Repubicans and black Democrats, the former who like the values imbedded in charter schools and the latter who care more about the next generation of African-American than they do about teachers' unions and the national Democratic leadership. These principals understand that leadership is an experimental art. And they are trying lots of different experiments, some of which challenge their own consensus-based non-authoritarian values, in order to see what works. They have success and failure. But unlike most of the rest of us, they are out there, on the cutting edge, doing whatever they can to salvage young lives who the system has failed.