Leadership and Passion

Much has been made of Barak Obama's coolness under fire, his capacity for staying calm when attacked, rising above the fray, distancing himself, what we call Getting on the Balcony.

Anyone who has watched the debates has seen that quality. David Brooks' op-ed piece in the Times yesterday was particularly insightful in pointing this out.

I have always thought that it was impossible to get elected President without making an emotional connection with people (see Dukakis, Michael; Kerry, John; Mondale, Walter). Obama is proving to be the exception.

Of course, if the Democrats were to blow this election they ought to pack their bags and try some other country. Hard to imagine a situation where they would have more externalities working in their favor. They could have nominated any of those folks who they paraded before us during the primary season and it would have been theirs to lose. And that was before the economy tanked.

To some extent, as a young, attractive, oratorically-gifted African-American (Remember Joe Biden's early comments about Obama being the kind of African-American who could get elected? He was right, of course, even though he was not in a position to say it. And now look where he is!), all Obama has to do is show up to generate an emotional response. But watching him, you do get the sense that he is somehow wired to stay cool. That ear-to-ear grin he displayed during McCain's roast at the Al Smith dinner was a campaign first for him.

If he can elected without displaying emotion, can he govern that way? Or, better still, can he exercise leadership, deliver bad news, ask for and get support for short term sacrifice, without touching our hearts?

I spent a few years working for Bill Weld, when he was Governor of Massachusetts. Weld, like Obama, is a cerebral fellow, supremely confident of his above-the-neck abilities. He, like Obama, took office during a difficult economic time, though on a much smaller scale than Obama will face. His lack of emotion was, on the whole, a huge asset to him as he cleaned up the financial mess the post-Presidential candidacy Dukakis Administration had left for him. He was able to make tough decisions without letting his feelings, or his ideology, get in the way. And, most important, he never took personally the intense criticism he received. He was able to brush it off as going with the territory. That's all on the plus side.

Weld was fortunate in that he never had to mobilize broad segments of people to make any sacrifice, to do anything difficult. He was able to forge behind the scenes agreements with the President of the State Senate and the Speaker of the Massachusetts House to get the legislation he needed.

Obama's dispassionate demeanor will stand him in good stead when he has to make a tough call and take heat for it. But as the first vote on the bailout showed, getting legislation through the Congress will require more than a good relationship with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reed. Obama will have to go over their heads and energize the public to put pressure on the Congress if he is going to get the country out of this economic mess and restore the nation's standing in the community of nations.

Barak Obama will have enormous political capital in his first few months in office. But, as Bill Clinton discovered, the post-election euphoria will quickly fade. In order to govern in difficult times, Obama will have to draw on a part of himself which, if it exists, has been kept under wraps for the entire campaign. It is an open question whether, if and when he tries to go there, he will find anything to draw on at all.

Scapegoating and the Bailout Blame Game

Palin's repeated references last night to "Wall Street greed and corruption" was just the latest in a string of diversionary finger-pointing and blaming. Gwen Ifill (who never should have been moderating the debate anyway because of the book she is writing which will be much more successful if Obama wins than if McCain should prevail, no matter how hard her defenders like David Hauslaib try to spin it away) colluded by asking the VP nominees who was to blame, but she's no different than many of her colleagues in the media who enjoy focusing on who to punish rather than what is wrong and what to do about it. Much more fun. Scapegoating is a classic work avoidance mechanism, a way of helping a group of people turn away from their own responsibility and accountability by pointing to someone else as the source of their discomfort. Hope you read Bethany McLean's courageous piece on the op-ed page of today's Times. Finally, someone, unsurprisingly not someone from political press or a politician, has put some responsibility on all of us, we who, after all, were the enablers for those Wall Street fat cats. They made off with their millions, but that was because we kept running up our credit card and mortgage debt, way beyond what we could afford if the house of cards ever started to fall. It is not government or Wall Street that has to change. Look in the mirror, folks. There's the culprit.

Obama and the race vote.....

Big conversation topic these days among my liberal friends is about what "those people" will do when they get into the privacy of the voting booth and no one else will know if they cannot vote for an African-American for President. I became a Republican in college because I thought my liberal Democratic friends were the least tolerant people I had ever met. They had no confidence in the voters. They thought they knew better what was good for people than the people knew for themselves and if only they and their kin were in charge, the world would be ok. So now they worry that the "hidden racist vote", not surfaced in the polls, will elect John McCain. I beg to differ. I have felt for over a year now that Barak Obama will win going away, ten points at least, 55-45 in the popular vote. People want to feel good about themselves when they leave the voting booth, and people will not want to feel as if they stood in the way of telling the world that this country was willing to elect an African-American to the Presidency. Those liberals who worry about the hidden racist vote would be better worrying about their own self-righteousness. The not-trusting-voters syndrome was at play on both the left and the right in the bailout vote fiasco yesterday. Those naysayers were unwilling either to stand up to uninformed and understandably anxious popular opinion, nor were they willing to try to educate their constituents. So they took the easy route and voted no. Safe and,I hope, sorry, they will be.

What a Day for Leadership!

So, in the roll call vote 2/3 of the Republicans and 40% of the Democrats took the no-risk route and voted their politics today. So, predictably, Obama and McCain blamed each other and each other's party. Leadership is risky; that's why there's so little of it, including from either of them. They played it as safe as they could. If either Obama or McCain saw this as a defining moment for their candidacies, or for their character, one in which we could tell if they had any political courage, if they would really put the broader interest ahead of their own narrow political interest, he could lock this election up. Memo to Barak and John: Go to DC, make phone calls, use your political capital and the possibility that you will be in the White House come January to cajole, pressure, harangue and do whatever else is necessary to pick up those handful of votes. No one knows if the bill will work. All we know is that the best minds that could be put together think it is their collective best guess. That's all it is. Just a guess. Not a solution. Just an experiment. But at the moment that we are looking to see what is inside each of them, neither John McCain nor Barak Obama has been willing take the risk this close to the Holy Grail of the Presidency, putting themselves on the line for the bill that might well would lose them votes and not prove a winning position on November 4. But that is par for the course. In the foreign policy debate last week, both steered away from anything that could blow up on them - like a nuanced view of the Middle East - and cited differences only where they were sure that those differences would accrue to their benefit. And there have been big issues all along that they have both ducked because they did not see them as wedge issues. The abandonment of New Orleans after Katrina is a national disgrace. It is a huge opportunity to show that we really do care about each other. And saving Social Security is too hot to handle. that's an opportunity to show that we really care about our kids and their kids. I have much more confidence in the American voters than either John McCain or Barak Obama seem to exhibit in their campaigns, with their distorting ads and their running away from the tough issues. How much worse does it have to get before they are willing to put it on the line?

Leadership on the economy? Candidates? Fahgeddaboutit...

Ok. We are in free fall. Everyone I know that "knows" anything says it is going to get worse before it gets better, but no one, no one, knows what to do now. Don't look to McCain or Obama. They are in the business of getting elected not demonstrating leadership. Getting elected is the purest form of pandering in a democratic society. Here's what it looks like: finding scapegoats, like McCain suggesting Christopher Cox should be fired or blaming Wall Street executives; delivering good news that people want to hear rather than bad news that they need to hear, like Obama telling those folks who took out mortgages they couldn't afford that they should be bailed out, too. Watch them closely in the Senate. See if either of them is willing to do anything that is good for the country that will risk even one vote that they think they need to win....