The Bottom Line Is Not Hope vs. Experience
Joyce Ladner
The differences between Obama and Clinton are not hope versus experience. If that were the case the campaign would not have galvanized a new generation of political activists. In typical lazy-media fashion, the election has been reduced to two word sound bites. Barack Obama is not "inexperienced" and incompetent, as Bill Clinton implied. (Neither, for that matter, is Hillary without "hope".)
When Hillary casts herself as competent to be president on Day One, she misses the critical understanding of what Americans are crying out for. To be a policy wonk is miles apart from having the management experience of a big city mayor or a governor. To immerse oneself in the arcane jargon and minuitae of public policies is not the same as having the capacity to inspire and to lead Americans to create and implement the much needed policies. I taught public policy and social welfare policy to graduate students for decades. I have also worked at a think tank whose raison d'etre is the development and analysis of the broadest spectrum of policies.
I took a course in higher education leadership at the Harvard School of Education some fifteen years ago. One of the professors asked the class to identify the most important traits of a leader. A majority of students said: competent administrator. We couldn't have been more wrong, according to the professor, who gave a spirited lecture on how one must be intelligent, competent, inspiring, and yes, have vision. There were other traits that I cannot recall. What we realized was that our narrow definition of leadership was that of being a good "paper pusher," in the arcane jargon of higher education.
In yet another leadership seminar at the Aspen Institute in the mid nineties, what I remember most are the readings that guided our discussion: "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," by Martin Luther King,Jr., and "A Room of Her Own" by Gertrude Stein. These were the texts that inspired generations of civil and human rights activists, and feminists. It is not accidental that Martin Luther King, Jr., and not President Lyndon B. Johnson, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
There are sharp differences between these two candidates but juxtaposing hope and experience is decidedly not the way to evaluate them.
The power of Sen. Obama's message is striking a chord that Bill Clinton does not seem to have heard. There is movement happening at the core level of the American electorate, a yearning for a message of systemic change.
ReplyDeleteConsider Idaho - one of the reddest of the red states. In 2004, some 5,000 Democrats participated in the caucises. This past Saturday, Sen. Obama spoke at 8:00 am - and drew at least 14,000 people.
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Hi Miss Caldonia,
ReplyDeleteYour vignette from Harvard evoked memories from my own career at a time when it moved into a leadership position; I found myself pondering the same question about what makes a good leader. I realized this: The yearning for a leader as your classmates did, who is foremost a “competent administrator,” is an expression of our nearly universal experience, finding ourselves obligated or annoyed by the mistakes and seeming unforgivable ignorance of those in charge. In that sense, yearning for competency is understandable and inextinguishable. I am not opposing your point about the coequal traits of inspiration and vision needed to lift simple leadership to great leadership rather I am underscoring a caveat that, once elected, a President Obama must back up his hopeful promise with extraordinary competence even genius.
It seems telling that despite Obama’s appeal for change many primary voters would accept Clinton or Obama. I think this reflects an underlying yearning for competency in leadership post Bush that Clinton is banking on. I hope Obama recognizes that tendency among voters. He would do well to work into his program more claims of his own competent abilities and not let that area of concern go uncontested to Clinton.