Barack and Harvey: Hands on the Thermostat

I just saw "Milk". Pretty good movie, I thought. But also a pretty good leadership lesson.

The good news is that for the most part, in the movie at least, Harvey Milk was able to get off the dance floor and onto the balcony, take a distanced view, and realize that the movement was not about him, but about gay rights, the value that he represented and cared about. The bad news is that in the movie, at two crucial moments he was too anchored on the dance floor and lost that perspective.

People who are out in front, like Harvey Milk thirty-one years ago, or Barack Obama today, with constituents and followers, are expected to regulate the temperature in the system and in a position to do so, as if they had a hand on the thermostat.

Of course, when you are in that role, you are never acting completely autonomously. In organizational life, your most ardent supporters usually want you to turn the heat down, keep things calm. In social movement life, your most ardent supporters usually want you to turn the heat up, on others, of course. And often, in both cases, what is required is just the opposite.

Having the expectation on you that you will control the heat is a great resource for exercising leadership. You need to know when to turn it up in order to put enough pressure into the system to get people to face up to difficult realities they would just as soon avoid, and when to turn it down because the pressure cooker you have created is about to blow up.

That's what Obama is dealing with right now, and what the movie portrays Harvey Milk having dealt with in the 1970s.

Here's where in the movie Milk failed to get on the balcony and therefore misread how close he was to blowing up the system. First, his fellow San Francisco supervisor (and soon after his assassin), Dan White, confronted him about feeling humiliated by being the lone vote against the gay rights ordinance. White represented all those people who felt at sea because the world they knew was passing them by, but Milk didn't need them to pass his ordinance so he was deaf to their concerns. Then, soon after, there is a scene where Mayor George Moscone told Milk he wanted to re-appoint White to the Board and Milk threatened Moscone with political retaliation. Moscone represented all those people, including many who agreed with Milk and, as suggested by the film, many policemen, but who did not want to see the other side humiliated.

Shortly after Moscone told White that he would not be re-appointed, White assassinated both Milk and Moscone. The system blew.

Last week, Obama faced rising populist anger and frustration. I received four e-mails from friends, left of center Democrats, full of fury, disproportionate particularly considering they had helped elect an African-American President who was trying to advance a domestic agenda they supported. I think that their fury at the bonus babies and the conservative commentators was a reflection of their frustration with Obama himself, not at his policies, but with his unwillingness to share and mirror their rage, to take revenge on the hated Bushies, and to respond viscerally to the injustices in the current situation.

Obama's uncharacteristic response last week, showing a flash of anger whether he felt it or not, and in spite of the reality that his Administration had more or less already signed off on the bonuses, was a way of calming down his own constituents, who were screaming for blood, before they did something foolish and undermined the whole mission. By railing against the bonus babies, he raised the heat, pacifying his angry constituents who were lusting for revenge and buying some time to address the substantive issues. The downside, of course, is that he legitimized and exacerbated the public humiliation of all the people who worked at AIG and other financial firms, whatever their role in the reckless risk-taking, and accelerated Congress' tendency to be easily diverted from the more troubling issues and tough choices around how to get out of this mess and focus on the outrage of the day. Not surprising that he has backed off from supporting the Congressional proposals which responded to his public anger.

Controlling the heat, keeping the temperature in a productive range, is an important tool of leadership for you as well as for Obama. My sense of Obama is that he understands the tool, but is not predisposed to use it. His coolness under fire has become, and maybe always was, part of his self-identity, and like any of one's own special gifts, it is also a vulnerability.

My sense is that this experience will reinforce his tendency default to his cerebral reflexes and he will have trouble in the future recognizing when to raise the heat when that is what is needed. I hope I'm wrong. Otherwise, he will never get us to face the trough choices we have to make to reset the system rather than live in the illusion that we can restore it to the status quo.