The Great Gatsby's diary about his courageous question to Hillary Clinton, and her non-response, shruticounseling found a better response hidden in Clinton's later comments (link to the news source here).
Clinton, who continued making her case to the Obama supporter drew loud cheers from the crowd when she told the man: "I wish we could believe that we could get to universal health care, that we could turn the economy around, that we could end the home foreclosure crisis merely by asking people to do it, by bringing them together, by pointing to a higher cause and expecting them to shelve their personal, ideological, personal and partisan advantages, that is not the way the world has ever worked."
It isn't? That's news to me.
I've been pondering the nature of leadership on and off for days now, trying to explain to myself what was different about Senator Clinton versus Senator Obama.
It sounds an awful lot like Senator Clinton has a very different notion of leadership than I do. Or, for that matter, than Wikipedia does:
Leadership:
- The ability "to get people to follow voluntarily."
- Those entities that perform one or more acts of leading.
- The ability to affect human behavior so as to accomplish a mission designated by the leader.
One of the differentiating factors between Management and Leadership is the ability or even necessity to inspire. A Leader, one who can instill passion and direction to an individual or group of individuals, will be using psychology to affect that group either consciously or subconsciously.
...
Leadership is not about changing the mindset of the group but in the cultivation of an environment that brings out the best (inspires) in the individuals in that group. Each individual has various environments that bring out different facets from their own identity, and each facet is driven by emotionally charged perceptions within each environment. To lead, one must create a platform through education and awareness where individuals fill each others needs. This is accomplished by knowing why people may react favorably to a situation in environment A, but get frustrated or disillusioned in environment B.
(Emphasis mine.)
Strangely, Senator Clinton is now telling us that the world has never worked that way.
It irritates me to hear Senator Obama's leadership qualities dismissed as empty rhetoric, or some kind of weak round-robin of compromise that could never possibly achieve anything, because that completely misses the point. When a person is strong enough to stand still and hold firm to his or her position, and to call people and convince people to follow, that is practical. That is effective. That is leadership.
Another great Chicagoan, the father of our sweeping lakeside parks and of some of our earliest post-fire great architecture, Daniel Burnham, once said of inspiration:
Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.
Apart from the inherent sexism of his age (this was 100 years ago, after all), Burnham got it right on the nose. People will follow someone who thinks big; those plans will "stir [people's] souls" and cause them to want to pitch in to bring those plans to life. But the vision, while important, is only part of it-- the other part, "let your watchword be order", is the other key to leadership. Once you have people following you, you must be able to keep them not only true to the cause but keep them part of an organized whole. That is leadership.
Over and over again, in large situations and in small, from the consistency of his message to the consistency of his fonts, from his well-built website to his call for a national conversation on race, we have seen Senator Obama demonstrate leadership. We have seen excellent organization in training volunteers and coordinating them, in building Democratic machines from scratch in county after county of "red" states, in keeping his campaign staff on-message and immediately firing one who threw an off-record slur at Senator Clinton, in knowing the ins and outs of each state's primary or caucus procedure. And every time, every damn time, he has included ordinary people, non-professionals, in the mix-- made us a wanted, needed, necessary part of his enterprise. People have responded to this by bringing all their gifts to the table, from the simple gift of monetary donations to the more beautiful and complex gifts of their own personal talents and expertise. Each gift is small by itself, but together, under such leadership, it is built into something far larger, far stronger, far more powerful. It's an awesome thing to watch and to be a part of, in the more archaic sense of the word: I am awe-struck, amazed, astonished, humbled.
I have to say that I have seen less impressive results from Senator Clinton's camp.
Given that much of Senator Clinton's material is written up by speechwriters, there's no guarantee that this has anything to do with the Senator's personal beliefs on the nature of leadership, but if it does, it fits in with a whole lot of other things that we've seen from her. It would fit in with her dismissal of the 50-State Strategy, the top-down nature of her campaign, the nature of her fundraising via a small number of big contributors rather than a large number of small ones, and the coup-de-superdelegate strategy. It might even explain why, according to Bill Richardson and others, she fervently believes that Senator Obama cannot win.
If this has anything to do with Senator Clinton's concept of how the world works, then in her eyes the only people who need to be brought on board for any plan are the professionals, the bigwigs, the rich, the People In Charge. In this worldview, we are not partners in our own government, in our own fate-- we don't have much to do with it at all, really, except to be convinced to vote for the best professional. We ought to compare resumés of the people in charge and ignore everything else, because all that matters is how much that one individual person (and the professionals at the top) can accomplish alone.
In that worldview, there is no need to inspire, no need to rally the troops or call upon the American people to sacrifice for a cause, because the non-professionals aren't part of the management of the country. There are the people, and then there are the people in charge, the professionals, the ones who Know How It Works. There's no leading those people; they're jaded from long exposure to the system and are entrenched in their own power. All you can do is to manage them as skillfully as possible by trading and compromising and handing out earmarks and influence.
If Senator Clinton "manages" her campaign that way, instead of leading it, then this would explain a lot about the in-fighting, back-stabbing, circular-firing-squad tendencies that have plagued her camp since the beginning-- because she gives away pieces of power to each professional, and lets each one create his or her own little fiefdom. It would explain why loyalty has such importance, rather than competence-- because where leadership creates trust and loyalty, management cannot, and so cannot count on people staying committed.
We, the people, are not part of this vision. And overall, this speaks badly to Senator Clinton's grasp of history. Our very country was founded on big ideas-- ideas of abandoning monarchy and relying on representative government which, at the time, had not been tested since ancient times-- and the stakes were higher than any we have today. The Declaration of Independence, a document designed to spit in the eye of a king, could easily have been a death sentence for any of the representatives who put their names on it.
And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.
How can that not stir our souls? I well up with tears of pride and awe every fourth of July when the inevitable slew of re-enactors read the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. We hold these truths to be self-evident-- and I'm gone, every time. I get downright weepy every time I hear "The Star Spangled Banner" sung-- which, in spite of having an unwieldy tune that excludes most of the population from singing it, is the greatest national anthem of all time, in my opinion, because it can be summarized as "those bastards threw everything they could at us and we're still standing, dammit!" I am a complete mess any time I listen to the soundtrack to 1776. My soul is well and truly stirred by the notion of America alone. How else could I live here and love this nation and want the best for it, for us?
How could that overwhelming kind of inspiration, that kind of complex idealistic vision, not be an integral part of leadership? How can an American Senator running for the greatest office in the land dismiss it? Worse, how can she miss the message inherent in our founders' words: we, the people, not we, the professionals. The people, the rabble, the great unwashed, are the greatest national resource of this great land, and any leader worth their salt should count themselves among the people first, and the professionals second, so that they may call upon that resource and have the legitimacy to bond the disparate parts together, to give them a direction, and to lead.
Senator Clinton, that is the way the world works. More to the point, that is the way America works. We, the people, have so very much to give if we are asked, if we are respected, if we are treated as adults who can contribute to the solution. And we will follow those who ask us. At this rate, these words will be carved on the gravestone of your campaign: she never asked.