fbpx

How Obama can get Democrats together, productively

I have been feeling angry and alienated as I watch the Democrats in Washington fritter away their electoral mandate. I’ve been asking why Barack Obama can’t be more like Harry S. Truman. I’ve been watching the party’s fortunes cascade downward toward an electoral catastrophe in November.
[additional-authors]
February 12, 2010

I have been feeling angry and alienated as I watch the Democrats in Washington fritter away their electoral mandate. I’ve been asking why Barack Obama can’t be more like Harry S. Truman. I’ve been watching the party’s fortunes cascade downward toward an electoral catastrophe in November.

But I have had an epiphany. Reading “The Audacity to Win,” David Plouffe’s book about the 2008 campaign, it hit me that Barack Obama is not Truman. He is Barack Obama. And when I started to think about Obama’s leadership style, I decided that expecting him to be Truman is pointless and that there is a great deal to appreciate in Obama’s style. Ultimately, though, it is a style that will require improvements to be successful.

Obama is a new kind of leader who has yet to find the best way to make his special skills translate into political power. Even as he gains traction politically, as he has been doing in recent weeks, he will have to solve the problem of how to lead his party to victory in November. He cannot really succeed without a strong party working with him.

I think there is a way of getting there.

In expecting Obama to lead like his predecessors, we miss the reality that his leadership style is horizontal, not hierarchical — the executive style most of us are used to seeing. Obama’s style of leadership is more contemporary, built on setting forth broad principles and then mediating among contending forces to implement his vision. Using the tools of community organizing, he reaches out to opponents and understands their positions. In the process he aims to draw out the best from people, without one person dominating.

In the workplace, we are seeing new styles of leadership replacing the traditional top-down CEO. Much of this is due to the advancement to executive positions of women and other formerly excluded groups. We are finding that different ways of leading are just as effective, if not more so, than traditional command-and-control. I myself have greatly prospered from working in settings with nontraditional leaders — women or members of other groups less favored in power circles — and have seen how well this model can work.

I doubt that Obama could have become the first nonwhite person (not just the first African American) to break into the exclusive White House club if he had a command-and-control style. A black Harry Truman would have been portrayed by an apoplectic media as the “New Angry Black Man.” Obama’s remarkable ability to explain both sides of the racial divide in his high-wire speech in Philadelphia is a vivid example of his ability. It saved his candidacy.

And this style can be tough. At key points in the campaign Obama demonstrated how tough he can be, as when he refused to join Hillary Clinton and John McCain in their demagogic proposal for a summer break in the gas tax, or to succumb to McCain’s challenge to cancel a presidential debate because of the economic crisis. His recent dramatic visit to the House Republican Caucus revealed a unique political style that reminds me of what Tom Bradley’s chief aide, Maury Weiner, once told me about his boss: “People mistake civility for weakness.” Pirates won’t make the same mistake again.

In other words, you can be tough without being Gen. Patton. It’s very 21st century. In fact, this may help explain Obama’s great popularity among young people, who are growing up around different leadership styles. If, as one wag once said, the young Al Gore was an adult’s idea of what a young person should be, Obama may be a young person’s idea of what a grown up should be today.

We’re seeing this play out in real time, but the presidency is a risky place to try out new styles. Washington is not used to it. And though the public seems to respond well, and Obama’s own ratings as a strong leader are remarkably high given the political problems he is facing, his party is not prospering, and there are great — and realistic — fears of electoral catastrophe in 2010. If the elections were held today, the Democrats would suffer devastating losses.

As I see it, Obama needs to make an adjustment to his style in order to help his party help him. If he is going to bring a new leadership style to D.C., he’s got to make it work.

The key to a mediating approach is that the leader/mediator has to be positioned in just the right spot between contending forces and then get them to take collective action. Pick the wrong spot to place your mediating tools, and you will fail. In his first year, Obama placed himself in the wrong spot; however, if he moves over to a new spot, things will change for the better.

Washington’s government today is made up of three main players: The liberal Democrats, quite powerful in the House of Representatives, which I’ll call player No. 1. The moderate/conservative Democrats, nicknamed Blue Dogs, more powerful in the Senate than in the House, player No. 2. Finally, there is the Republican Party, which is highly unified in both House and Senate, which I will treat as player No. 3.

As any skilled negotiator knows, it is better to mediate between two forces than three. Two’s company; three’s a crowd. So a choice must be made. The third player gets left out in the cold.

In Obama’s first year, he placed himself as the active mediator between the Blue Dogs and the Republicans — players No. 2 and No. 3. So we draw a circle around them. (See Chart No. 1.)

Did you enjoy this article?
You'll love our roundtable.

Editor's Picks

Latest Articles

Print Issue: Got College? | Mar 29, 2024

With the alarming rise in antisemitism across many college campuses, choosing where to apply has become more complicated for Jewish high school seniors. Some are even looking at Israel.

More news and opinions than at a
Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.

More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.

More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.