53. Presidential Leadership

 

What this country needs is one President to feel our pain and another one to do something about it. There really isn't time for a man to do both, to respond promptly on television to the Standard and Poor downgrade of Treasury bonds and counter the forces that bring on such a thing.

The first President would satisfy what is apparently the current conception of presidential leadership: showing the country an exemplary way to think, feel, and live.

Oh how such a President would protect the second President from the kind of criticism Barack Obama is getting now on the Op-Ed pages of the country! He'd be johnny-on-the-spot with a response to the death of the 22 Navy Seals (not in Hawaii on vacation, speaking three days late); he'd be ready with something wise and comforting about the S & P downgrade and the crash that followed.  With Obama, says Maureen Dowd, "It's all been 'too little, too late.'"

In World War II the expression "too little, too late" was searingly used to describe what Britain sent to help the Norwegians and then the Greeks to hold off the Germans. The failure of leaders to do enough, on time, had the most dire material consequences. The failure before us now is a rhetorical failure, and it apparently will have dire political consequences. Calling it a failure of leadership will sound strange to those who remember "too little, too late" as it applied to what our leaders were doing then. It didn't matter what Roosevelt said or where he was. If he saw that we put enough troops on the shore of Africa on time that was leadership.

I don't want to deny the term "leader" to someone who bucks up the country. Roosevelt did a lot of that, beginning with "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." But that part of a President's job has, with television, grown so that it is in danger of crowding the other part, the part done out of sight, the part with material consequences, into just a corner of the American consciousness. For Maureen Dowd that corner is very small. President Obama "doesn’t lead, and he doesn’t understand why we don’t feel led." There's her idea of leadership. No matter what he does he can't be called a leader unless he speaks, on time and sufficiently.

In my plan we'll have one President to make sure the country feels led and another to lead it. They'll both have time to do their jobs and they'll both be properly called "leaders."