LEADERSHIP

In his column on May 3, Thomas Friedman called for the development of a “third party.” He focuses on energy as the key issue around which a new centrist coalition can be built. But today I want to look at the issue of “leadership” before we get into issues. Micah Sifry in his book, Spoiling for a Fight: Third-Party Politics in America clearly said that “there is an opportunity here for someone who will seize it,” but what kind of person?

Leadership? Is it a kind of spirit gift? Is it a technique or skill that can be taught and learned? Is it a quality that emerges in many of us, only when certain challenges and circumstances require a response? Is its capacity inherited? Do different cultures understand leadership in different ways? These and other perplexing issues have been the topics of analysis for historians, social behaviorists, and philosophers for many years.

Developing a climate for discussion that may result in a new vision for America will require leadership, but what kind?

David Hackett Fischer, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in history, has reflected on this topic in an attempt to circumscribe that unique form of American political leadership. He argues that whatever ones political orientation, left, centrist or right, the overwhelming consensus is that three presidents, Washington, Lincoln, and F.D. Roosevelt, were the most successful presidential leaders. What was it that they had in common? They were all from different centuries, different social classes, faced different issues, and were of different temperments. But what did they have in common?

Fischer argues that there were at least three shared characteristics:

· Each had a “cause,” not an “ideology,” that propelled them;

· Each believed that we were a society where the whole was more than the sum of its parts and where personal freedoms were for the common good; and

· Each was very bright, but not in an academic sense; and each learned to listen to diverse opinions and form policy out of that variety of perspectives.

This he calls, “open leadership” and it is the kind of leadership I hope our discussion of the renewal of America will honor and promote. Next week we will talk about issues.