CE Week #13: “Wish list of presidential traits”
David S. Broder
Washington Post
November 22, 2007
Peter Hart, the Democratic pollster whose firm has interviewed thousands of voters this year, says the attributes most of them desire in a president for 2008 can be summed up in three words: transparency, authenticity and unity.
I needed help from him in understanding the first word. But when he said it meant honesty, openness, forthrightness in expressing views, and clarity about the sources of the candidate’s support, I said that sounded right.
The other two traits were easily understandable. Authenticity means comfort in one’s own skin, a minimum of pretense or artificiality, and especially consistency and predictability on matters of principle.
The hankering for unity is also palpable and reflects the conspicuous absence of agreement – and excess of partisanship – in the contemporary political scene. I have been saying for months that voters care less whether the next president is a Democrat or a Republican than that the person moving into the Oval Office be someone who can pull the country together to face its challenges.
That is also the theme of an excellent new book by Ron Brownstein, the able political reporter who recently left the staff of the Los Angeles Times to become political director of the Atlantic Media Company, publishers of The Atlantic magazine, National Journal and The Hotline.
The book – “The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America” – is a guide to a dysfunctional political environment that has poisoned relationships between the executive and legislative branches and made this session of Congress notably acrimonious and unproductive.
Brownstein traces the problem back to the “sorting-out” process, which shuffled both parties’ membership starting in the 1960s. Congressional districts in the South that once elected conservative Democrats began electing Republicans. States bordering Canada that once elected moderate or progressive Republicans started electing Democrats.
Where each party used to have an ideological mixture, each is now more clearly defined – in opposition to the other. The result is a Republican Party that is far more universally (and stridently) conservative; and a Democratic Party whose center of gravity has moved equally far to the left.
The center has become lightly populated, and the penalties for politicians who communicate, let alone consort, across party lines have become much stiffer. The incentives are almost all to hunker down and fight, not to compromise and settle.
The congressional divisions have been heightened by President Bush’s strategic decision to govern almost entirely within his own party’s relatively narrow political base. He courted mainly core Republicans to power his two trips to the White House and he has relied almost exclusively on Republican votes in the House and Senate to sustain his program.
While giving him some notable victories, this strategy also solidified the opposition and stiffened the Democrats’ determination to oppose him at every opportunity – whatever the consequences.
But, as Brownstein notes, there has been no comparable increase in partisanship among the voters, who cling stubbornly to a common-sense, moderate conservative view – and simply want the practical problems that bother them addressed. The things the public worries about – the Iraq War, health care, energy, immigration – are not partisan problems, but national challenges.
That is why Hart puts unity up there with the other two principal desires in his distillation of the most-wanted presidential qualities.
The current field of presidential candidates does not offer much hope of finding that ideal. But Brownstein has a suggestion that could help the eventual winner: Consider a collaborative or what he calls an “interactive” approach to the presidency.
“On health care,” he writes, “a president could ask the heads of General Motors and Wal-Mart to sit with the leaders of the major health care unions and consumer groups to explore areas of agreement, and to pinpoint their remaining disagreements. On energy issues, oil and utility executives could be brought together with environmentalists and climate scientists. Such a convening style of leadership would tap the energy of voters and interest groups alike exhausted by the warfare in Washington.”
Indeed, it would. And what a cause for Thanksgiving that would be.
Well, if transparency, authenticy, and unity are the traits that america are looking for (although personally unless all those were explained to the people polled I doubt hardly anyone would get the meaning of all those words… specially transparency.
This all seems to be kind of a backlash against Hillary Clintons campaign… and in support of Obama… at least that is what I thinkof when I read the first couple paragraphs of this article.
I understand the transition of the South from the democrats (which in Licolns time support slavery and the annexing of the states) to the republicans because in the 1968 democrats went far left liberal to pick up the minority vote and lost the south because the south elected conservative democrats. I don’t quite understand the reason for the shift of the north between republican to democrat, but I can only guess it has something to do with industrialization? maybe? I don’t know.
Was it ever okay for politicians to deliberately cross the democratic republican line… or switch to any other party? I’d believe that the competition between the parties would have stopped that no matter what time we live in.
I agree that the partys have begun to divide America more though. We do need a president to bring the country together. The problem would be that the parties are the bigger idea than the president. the parties get the president elected based on their slate of stands on issues that they show to the electorate.
So I doubt the next president will do those things but who knows, they might swing towards the middle once they get elected. For example Bill Clinton did that.
Only three words is a little short to sum up what is desired in the president. The three words that are used do mean a lot to what a president should be, but so many more could also be applied. If we look back at Bush and see did he have transparency. You could only say that in some respects that it doesn’t seem to be so. If it is meant to mean honesty he really seems that he might not have been honest. He might have know that 9/11 was going to happen or that it might happen. Also he might have known that Iraq had no wmd’s either. It sounds funny that the president we other people picked (not me) is not what we want now in a president. In other terms of Bush he does have authenticity or is comfortable in his skin. He did both things with unity. He brought a lot of of the country together because they came together over 9/11 and the Iraq war. He also broke apart some of the country because many people don’t think that we should be in Iraq right now because we really have no reason to be there. I hope that our next president will be a great leader and follow all of what this article is saying. If we don’t pick a candidate like Clinton or Obama we might not be in the situation that we want to be in when we reach 2012.
Transparency, authenticity, and Unity.
Three words to sum up what the electorate wants in the president is, as Evan Domanico pointed out, yes, quite terse. But I think that it is epidemic of a couple of things, and one is the running away from issue voting, or, more precisely, the running away from issue campaigning. Kautzman likes to call it, “hedging your bet.” (In fact, that’s probably his second favorite catch phrase, right behind, “money is the mother’s milk of politics”) The idea is simple enough. When you take a definitive stance on an issue, or again, more precisely, when you campaign on a definitive stance, you alienate all of the people who disagree with you. You loose votes. Politicians (unsurprisingly) don’t like loosing votes. However, when instead of campaigning on issues you campaign on charisma, well– anyone can vote for a charming smile.
In the era of the modern election candidates, in their infinite wisdom (infinite wisdom in regards to expediency & efficiency) have moved toward the winning strategy of a winning personality. Al Gore lost to George W. Bush because Gore was too smart; you could imagine drinking a beer with “Dubya” (on a wood porch, on creaking rocking chairs, watchin’ the bug-zapper – “mm’yup that was a big’n” “Yes Dubya, it was” “Bugs do get zapped”) but not with the now nobel-prize winning Al Gore. He didn’t loose because of his stand on the environment, or taxes, medicare, medicade, or social security, but because he was too smart.
We now have accepted that a politicians role is to charm our pants off.
Oh naive little writer. Yes how nice would it be if politicians did what made sense. Because yes, “on energy issues, oil and utility executives could be brought together with environmentalists and climate scientists”, and yes “ such a convening style of leadership would tap the energy of voters and interest groups alike exhausted by the warfare in Washington”. However, for us kids who like to hang out in the real world, this will never happen. Oil companies make way to much money to give it up for the betterment of the world and no one is going to hold hands and sing around a camp fire in Washington. It’s a nice dream, but in reality it is only dream. People are too greedy and never have enough power, especially in politics. Do you really think that each candidate for president really thinks he or she (oh Hillary) is the best for the job? I doubt it. Seriously I am one of those people who honestly think that we probably have a cure for cancer, but you know what…the drug companies make way to much money on the drugs they sell now to let it happen. America is full of greedy, power hungry, people. But hey, that mentality has been instilled into us since we were born. As Napoleon Dynamite would say, I’m going to do “Whatever I feel like I wanna do. Gosh!”
Mallory Brown