Looking for mad leaders for hard times?

Winston Churchill said he never found anyone interesting who’d lived through a happy childhood. Nassir Ghaemi, director of the Mood Disorders Program at Tufts University Medical Center gets in closer, assembling an entire book on the proposition that depression and mania make leaders more realistic and empathic, and mania makes them more creative and resilient.

“A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness” has touched a nerve. It’s been reviewed widely and he’s appeared on the Stephen Colbert Show. His series of short sketches of everyone from Churchill and Martin Luther King to Lincoln and Tony Blair, however, hasn’t caused much stir. The way his thesis is glibly applied to the present is the sensation.

“‘For abnormal challenges,’ Ghaemi insists, ‘abnormal leaders are needed.’ The text makes only one reference to the current president, warning us that while “‘no drama’ Obama might be considered the epitome of mental health,’ we must remember that ‘psychological moderation’ is not the prescription for greatness.”

Click on: www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/books/review/a-first-rate-madness-by-nassir-ghaemi-book-review.html?pagewanted=all

As one reviewer put it: Is Barack Obama too sane to lead the United States in times of crisis? Are stable leaders inappropriate for shaky time?

Click on: www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/careers/management/morning-manager/the-right-leader-in-a-crisis-may-not-be-the-stable-one/article2147615/

As a child of the Cold-War and Mutually Assured Destruction, there’s something ridiculously naive about the question. The government of the US today, like the Government of Great Britain in the summer of 1940, is not a start-up company that can be run by an egomaniac or a poem born after days of anguish alone in a room.  The White House’s ability to make decisions, to make a positive difference—and to not do terrible harm—rests on the reliable application of disciplined intelligence.  You can’t skip sanity to be a great President.

Churchill and Lincoln’s “black dogs” encumbered their lives but didn’t cloud either their values or their clear heads as decision makers. Churchill’s values and experience, and a great writer’s ability to see what he saw drove his early radical assessment of Hitler. His depressions and drinking in the Thirties only helped keep him out of power, unable to avoid a catastrophe.

When finally in office, Churchill didn’t decide to make a dear friend and pen pal out of President Roosevelt because he thought they would be ideal soul mates. To do his job—to survive Hitler—he had to. In the spring of 2008, Barack Obama didn’t huddle with bankers and big businesses and double the US deficit because he was a confused Uncle Tom, meekly following instructions George Bush had left on his desk. Obama saw it as his responsibility to avert another Great Depression.

Certainly, it would have been more interesting for everyone if Obama had waited for the economy to collapse and used that time writing fire side chats to radicalize America later. But, do we want leaders to lead us into “abnormal” times so they can be a little more “abnormal” as well?

The idealist’s problem with divided government

Hendrik Hertzberg’s review of Amanda Foreman’s “A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War” includes a striking quotation on the problem the best of presidents have in meeting the expectations of America’s best friends—whether in 1863 or today.

England’s most ardent liberals never warmed to Lincoln; he simply wasn’t sufficiently wholehearted, especially on slavery. The Emancipation Proclamation, Foreman writes,

“… was widely denounced as a cynical and desperate ploy . . . even pro-Northern supporters could not understand why Lincoln had allowed the border states to keep their slaves, unless the emancipation order was directed against the South rather than slavery itself. ‘Our people are very imperfectly acquainted with the powers of your Federal Government’ explained the antislavery crusader George Thompson to his American counterpart, William Lloyd Garrison. ‘They know little or nothing of your constitution—its compromises, guarantees, limitations, obligations, etc. They are consequently unable to appreciate the difficulties of your president.”

Click on: www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2011/08/01/110801crbo_books_hertzberg

Imperfectly acquainted? Indeed.

For a long time, it was understandable that eminent British and European politicians wouldn’t bother to understand America’s convoluted system of government. Its liberal principles were magnificent on paper, but probably wouldn’t work for long. A great power, Old World Machiavellians believed, needed to have a powerful central executive that was clearly superior to individual states and was enjoying extensive freedom from—and dominant influence in—popular legislative bodies.

Lincoln saved the American union, but neither he nor his successors have been able to make it easier to exercise leadership through the Office of the President. There’s a strange irony here: the head of state of the most powerful nation on earth still looks weaker than the leaders of its democratic partners.

So, why, after being able to make the US constitution work for so long, is compromise by the White House still seen as an option, a reflection of a president’s temperament, and not something embedded in his job description? Why is it not an encumbrance Barack Obama can set aside for the last year of his first term—letting him get things done like a CEO?

America’s constitution is not power-friendly. It is liberal, however, in that it makes it no easier to be a reformer than a reactionary.

When people are passionate, America’s constitution is not entirely people-friendly either.

That is a price most people, and especially progressives, should be happy to pay. Forcing presidents to be persuasive and to reason with others who are equally secure in their constitutional roles helps protect America as a relatively safe place to be an adult, to be unpopular, and to be out of fashion.

Today, European and American romantics can’t be excused for their ignorance—despite its checks and balances, America’s federal government has been able to keep up with the times and serve the noisiest grass-roots democracy in the world. The pace of strategic decision-making doesn’t fit the contemporary news cycle or the attention span of the more fevered partisans. However, if we hold our fire and observe what’s happening over a reasonable span of time, we will see that Presidents can still lead, within the rules.

Friday wrap-up: Obama’s austere rhetoric

Last year, Merriam-Webster Dictionary declared “austerity” as its Word of the Year. Apparently, “austerity” generated more than 250,000 searches on its online website, rising with coverage of the debt crisis. It can refer to extreme economy, but also to an austere manner or attitude. Whatever you think of Barack Obama’s politics when he mounts the presidential bully pit, you have to admit: his manner perfectly matches these harsh times.

His stark definition of the two, largely overlapping fiscal strategies now before Congress and his insistence that Congress’s newest members must also compromise to get things done was partisan. Yet even that was balanced by a rather nice idea: “I realize that a lot of the new members of Congress and I don’t see eye-to-eye on many issues. But we were each elected by some of the same Americans for some of the same reasons.”
 

(Nevertheless, even when he’s just being clear, his most bitter critics take offense. Here’s William Kristol’s prickly take on one unfortunate cliché in Obama’s Monday night address: “These ‘people outside of Washington’ are not little children being lectured on an obscure subject by a worldly adult.”)  

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/2011/07/transcript-obamas-speech-debt-limit#ixzz1TPXmXEui

Obama’s speech didn’t alter the odds facing either side of Congress’s grinding partisan showdown. But it may be highly regarded when the history of this period is written. This doesn’t console his own supporters, and it depresses many who simply wish that he could end-run the panoply of forces aligned against him.

However, Obama’s friends—and America’s—shouldn’t lose heart. And Republicans better start preparing to take—as well as throw—hard punches. Obama will soon be as partisan as it takes to win the next election.

Imagine what Lincoln’s campaign war room must have thought of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. In November 1863, the war seemed interminable, anti-war- and draft-resistance sentiments were rising in the north, and his chances for re-election were dimming in his own mind. A great audience was assembled. Yet, at the end of a puny two-minute address, all Lincoln asked for was “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Hard times do not yield smartly to clear thinking, carefully expressed. In the noise of the moment, these virtues are often overshadowed. Fortunately, however, they have been in the arena at every turn for the better in American history.