What Leads You To Select the Next President?

I have not done any political posts in my previous 12 years of posting. Not really one of my interests. But in this election year of 2020, I am drawn to study the topic of how people choose to select the next president. I will do this by studying the qualities of the past 10 presidents (not political issues).

Organizational Abilities

A president’s capacity as an organizer includes his ability to build a team and minimizing the tendency of subordinates to tell their boss what they sense he wants to hear. Veterans of the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Ford, and George H. W. Bush presidencies have nothing but praise for their erstwhile chiefs. In contrast, few Johnson, Carter, and Clinton lieutenants emerged from their White House service with unmixed views of the president they served.

Presidents also differ in their ability to avail themselves of a rich and varied fare of advice and information. FDR encouraged diversity in the recommendations that reached him by pitting his assistants against one another. Kennedy’s method was to charge his brother Robert and his alter ego Theodore Sorensen with scrutinizing the proposals of his other advisers for flaws and pitfalls.

The modern president with by far the greatest and most demanding organizational experience was Eisenhower, who had a highly developed view of the matter. “I know of only one way in which you can be sure you have done your best to make a wise decision,” he declared in a 1967 interview.

Good Brain

The President must be a simplifier. Reagan is rightly criticized when he oversimplifies, which is often, but some of his simplifying are just right, not unlike good teaching or preaching.

In abstract intelligence, it could be that L.B.J., Nixon, and Carter would rate highest among the modern Presidents. All suffered from a lack of judgment and proportion, which does not show up in IQ tests.

A President needs a sense of history, including a feel for the situations where history does not apply. Jimmy Carter, despite his speed-reading studiousness and remarkable memory, was strangely deficient here.

A President must offer the country vision, and he must animate his Administration with purposes larger than the enjoyment of office. A visible zest for the job is perfectly legal, even desirable.

A President needs an ever-fresh curiosity about his big and complicated country. He can help overcome his isolation by seeking and taking advice from a broad circle. But many otherwise courageous people will simply not talk candidly to a President. He may be a very courteous listener, as Carter was, and still be incapable of any real exchange except with a very few intimates. Reagan is more open as a personality but not notably open to “new” facts.

Political Perspectives

 
Lyndon Johnson seemed almost to have taken his methods from the pages of Presidential Power. Within hours after Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson had begun to muster support for major domestic policy departures. He exhibited will as well as skill, cultivating his political reputation by keeping Congress in session until Christmas 1963 in order to prevail in one of his administration’s first legislative contests.

His actions won him strong public support, making it apparent to his opposite numbers on Capitol Hill that it would be politically costly to ignore his demands.

Character and Temperament

The presidential bedrock must be integrity, perceived, and real. (Integrity includes an honorable private life.) There is an unavoidable tension between this necessity and the political necessities of maneuver, indirection, and calculated ambiguity. Of the two masterly political operators among the modern Presidents, F.D.R. was frequently dancing along the ethical borderline, and L.B.J. was often well across it.

The President needs perseverance and personal ambition within healthy limits. A fashionable cynicism is that anybody so ambitious that he would put up with what it takes to get nominated and elected is morally disqualified for the presidency.

Having a Vision

“Vision” is a term with many connotations. One is the capacity to inspire. In this, the rhetorically gifted presidents — Kennedy, Reagan, and above all FDR — excelled. In the narrower meaning employed here, “vision” refers to preoccupation with the content of policies, and the ability to assess their feasibility and the possession of a set of overarching goals.

Here the standouts are Eisenhower, Nixon, and to a lesser extent Ronald Reagan, whose views were poorly grounded in specifics. Vision also encompasses the consistency of viewpoint. Presidents who stand firm are able to set the terms of policy discourse. In effect, they serve as anchors for the rest of the political community.

George H. W. Bush was not alone in lacking “the vision thing.” He falls in a class of presidential pragmatists that includes the bulk of the modern chief executives.

The costs of vision-free leadership include internally inconsistent programs, policies that have unintended consequences, and sheer drift. When it comes to vision, the senior Bush could not have been more different from his son, George W. Bush, for whom having an explicit agenda is a watchword.

A President needs tremendous physical stamina (though George Reedy, one of L.B.J.’s press secretaries, has noted that “no President ever died of overwork”). The 36-primary campaign, whatever else may be said of it, is a rigorous physical exam. We, at least, know that anybody who can get nominated and elected is in good shape

Cognitive Style

Presidents vary widely in their cognitive styles. Jimmy Carter had an engineer’s proclivity to reduce issues to what he perceived to be their component parts. That style served him well in the 1978 Camp David negotiations, but it was ill-suited for providing his administration with a sense of direction.

Another example of strategic intelligence is to be had from a chief executive who will never grace Mount Rushmore: Richard Nixon. Two years before entering the White House, Nixon laid down the goals of moving the United States beyond its military involvement in Vietnam, establishing a balance of power with the Soviet Union, and an opening with China. By the final year of his first term, he had accomplished his purposes.

Having Emotional Intelligence

Four presidents stand out as fundamentally free of distracting emotional perturbations: Eisenhower, Ford, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush. Four others were marked by emotional undercurrents that did not significantly impair their leadership: Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and Reagan.

That leaves Johnson, Nixon, Carter, and Clinton, all of whom were emotionally handicapped. LBJ was subject to mood swings of clinical proportions. Jimmy Carter’s rigidity was a significant impediment to his White House performance. The defective impulse control of Bill Clinton led him into actions that ensued in his impeachment.

Richard Nixon was the most emotionally flawed of the presidents considered here. His anger and suspiciousness were of Shakespearean proportions. He more than any other president summons up the classic notion of a tragic hero who is defeated by the very qualities that brought him success.

Skill as a Communicator

Most presidents have not addressed the public with anything approximating the professionalism of countless educators, members of the clergy, and radio and television broadcasters. Roosevelt, Kennedy, Reagan, Obama — and Clinton at his best — are the shining exceptions.

One president who allowed himself to be fazed by an accomplished predecessor was George H. W. Bush, Bush used the White House briefing room for his public communications, only rarely addressing the nation from the Oval Office, and he instructed his speechwriters to temper his prose. Bush’s initial three years of high public approval provide a reminder that formal addresses are not the only way for a president to remain in the good graces of the public.

The bottom line

The moral of this story is that culture can have a significant influence on leadership and team development. You definitely need leadership for the future more than anything else.

If these different thoughts are possessed by your current leadership or your emerging leaders, you will be in a good position for the road ahead.

Which of these thoughts on leadership collaboration stands out to you? Do you have any other ideas of effective leaders worthy of mention?