A Question of Leadership

Not much evidence of leadership in any of the three principal presidential candidates today.

The closing question at the Austin debate addressed leadership, and what "leadership" meant at a time of crisis.

I wanted to hear one of the candidates explain that leadership is principle-based, but situational, dependent on some combination of courage, integrity, confidence and intelligence with which the leader has his or her best chance to inspire trust, commitment and affection in the people, so they are willing to follow him or her through the situation to the other side.

I didn't hear anything like that. Sen. Obama took off on an "arc of life" answer that mentioned neither crisis nor leadership. Sen. Clinton got a laugh about having been in a crisis or two, and fashioned a feel-good commentary that played well, but I was waiting for her to say something about what she would do if a crisis was coming up the national driveway.

Leadership is difficult to talk about under pressure, which is exactly the kind of situation that requires leadership. I would like to see one of these presidential debates dedicated to the question, "What is leadership?" It is a topic that would easily fill 90 minutes, and I think everyone involved – participants and audience – would know more about leadership when it was finished.

I would want Sen. McCain to be a party to that debate. He was an officer, a commander, and a prisoner of war, so, for him, discussing leadership would be as easy as drinking coffee. Yet in The New York Times on Friday was a column by David Brooks giving the impression that leadership is something Sen. McCain no longer practices.

That was not the column's intent. Brooks sought to expose the background of a bitter "rift, which has caused duplicity and anger to seep into the campaign of this fine man." This rift, between two men close to McCain, Rick Davis and John Weaver, Brooks wrote, is "the background for the article my colleagues at The New York Times published Thursday."

That article, of course, was about Sen. McCain's relationships with lobbyists in general, and with one in particular, which McCain's advisors feared had edged dangerously close to romance. The article hinged on information provided by two sources within the McCain organization. Brooks said the two camps, Davis and Weaver, blamed the other for talking to The Times. He said the two "share a mutual hatred . . . that is absolute, mutual and blinding." The McCain campaign became "a house divided against itself," from which "poisons spread outward."

Poisons spreading outward, from a house divided against itself, which seeks White House residency? I think that situation would qualify as the kind of crisis requiring leadership in a presidential candidate, not today, but years ago, when the grand and mutual Davis-Weaver hatred arose. Yet, as Brooks concludes, "The poisons have yet to be drained."

So today has been quite a bummer. I know so many of us are counting the hours until Inauguration Day, but dear God, please, after the Bush years, let's make leadership a primary criterion in the selection of his replacement, and insist on candidates that know leadership from third base, and will run hard for it.