Leadership: Self-righteousness and Self-doubt

I was surprised by how focused I was last week on Arlen Specter's decision to bolt the Republican Party and join the Democrats. Why should anyone care?

Part of my response was simply personal. I still cling to my identity as a liberal Republican, a choice I made fifty years ago. Specter is "nice Jewish boy" like me, who has used the Republican Party and been used and abused by it for most of his adult life. His abrupt departure makes the already thin ranks of socially-liberal, fiscally conservative Republicans even smaller. I feel lonely.

But this process has been going on for decades. Back in early 1972, when I was a three-term Massachusetts state legislator contemplating running for Congress, I received a surprising phone call from then-Congresswoman Margaret Heckler, asking me to come to her home in Wellesley for a cup of coffee. (Heckler later was US Secretary of Health and Human Services, after she was defeated for re-election in 1982 by Barney Frank.) She and I had known each other casually as fellow elected Massachusetts Republicans. Our only real engagement had come when she was on the Platform Committee for the Republican National Convention in 1968 and I had tried in several uncomfortable conversations to convince her that a Republican perspective on abortion would be to emphasize individual freedom of choice and that public policy decisions, if they are to be made, should be left to the states rather than the national government. (She didn't buy either argument.)

Over coffee that morning at her house, Heckler tried to persuade me not to run for Congress. She said, "You know me well enough, Marty, to know that I am not all that liberal in my views. But even so, I am almost a pariah in the Republican Party in Congress. My Fellow Republicans ignore me, dismiss me, and ostracize me. I feel very isolated. Are you sure you want to be a part of that environment?"

She was no more successful in persuading me not to run that I was in changing her position on abortion. I have often wondered what would have happened if I had won that race.

(I ran and lost. Some Republican stalwarts put a very conservative independent candidate into the race so that even though I held the incumbent to less than 50%, the third candidate siphoned off enough voters from me to end my electoral career. 1972 was a pretty ugly year for Republicans in Massachusetts. As fellow political junkies may recall, Massachusetts was the only state that George McGovern carried against Richard Nixon in the Presidential race and I was the only Republican candidate for Congress in the whole country who ran ahead of the national ticket and lost, and I ran 20 points ahead of the ticket!).

Despite holding onto to my Republican affiliation even as that part of my life fades deeply into obscurity, the Spector defection also raised less personal issues for me.

Specter's reasons for becoming a Democrat are pretty straightforward. His own polling showed that it would be almost impossible for him to beat former Republican Congressman Pat Toomey in the Pennsylvania Republican primary next year. By switching his allegiance, he may give the Democrats a filibuster-proof 60-vote count in the Senate, so he was probably able to extract a pretty good welcoming deal from Majority Leader Harry Reid and President Obama. Good for Specter.

But he must have made a calculation that his own political survival, keeping his Senate seat, was more important to him than fighting within the Republican Party for the values he has espoused all his political life. He was self-righteous and arrogant not to risk his own power on behalf of those values.

Survival is a wonderful instinct. Specter is a cancer survivor as well as a political survivor. But with five terms already under his belt in the US Senate, having just turned 79 years old, you would think he would be willing to go down in history fighting for what he believed in, rather than being remembered mostly for a politically expedient party switch.

Leadership is risky. Leadership involves taking risks on behalf of Purpose and not about individual aggrandizement. Leadership is about embodying enduring values, putting in jeopardy your own personal ambition.

I became a Republican in part (there are lots of reasons, but that's another blog post) because I could not identify with the smug liberals at college, who were so sure they were right about everything that they ridiculed other people's perspectives and were completely closed to learning. They were the least open, the least tolerant people I knew. I agreed with where they came down on many if not most of the issues, but I was racked with self-doubt where they had none, and I wanted to be with people who were continuing to search, rather than those who had already found the holy grail.

It is a paradox of leadership: you have to be completely committed to what you are doing in order to step out there and take the risks, but at the same time, with equal persistence, you have to hang on to self-doubt, always keeping open the possibility that there is a better idea out there. Otherwise, how can you ever learn and grow?

But, then again, I might be wrong about that.