Be A Catalyst
Learning to be a great leader is the last area where anyone is a novice all over again.
And unlike most training programs, students of leadership get their marks from the people they lead.
Since being popular and being accurate don’t always go hand in hand, it’s the job of a great leader to show the people a vision of the road ahead that they can get behind.
Whether born with greatness or having had greatness thrust upon them, great leaders must become human catalysts - jump-starting a call to integrity that is required for the survival of a free society.
In the second presidential debate a week ago, the needle on my catalyst meter barely shuddered as occasionally an original statement gasped for air through the crowd of buzzwords and incomplete thoughts.
The wordiness of both candidates was finally called out by Tom Brokaw, who compared it to the national deficit.
Although I am an independent voter - raised conservative and, I like to say, seasoned as a liberal, I am a former Hillary Clinton supporter who is voting for Barack Obama. So naturally I wanted my candidate to do better in the debate.
I kind of like John McCain, even though I’m irked by his refusal to back viable sources of renewable, safe carbon-free energy and I don’t think he’s the best man for the job of president.
I will even defend McCain from the whining of young liberals who declared on twitter.com during the debate, "He’s not my friend, I wish he would stop saying that."
"My friends" is how Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed Americans during his first Fireside Chat after the banking system collapsed.
Maybe liberals’ disgust at McCain’s attempt to be their friend is a message: "My friends" sounded genuine in 1929, and hackneyed in 2008.
In other words, what works in one time period may not work in another. And while Obama did not have the audacity to assume a friendship with his countrymen, his performance in the second debate still disappointed me.
I went back and watched it again, and I realized that Obama mentioned the ideas I cared about - solving the energy and climate dilemma and steering the nation once again toward a direction where quality of life matters.
But both candidates spoke in a toxic cloud of buzzwords - "middle class," "wages and income," "ordinary families," "earmarks," "Middle Eastern oil," all valid talking points that have unfortunately become so cheap we completely zone out when we hear them.
Instant sedative.
To be fair, I’m glad Obama defended himself in the debate; he still has more chutzpah than the last four Democratic candidates put together.
And then there was that little matter of the near-collapse of the banking system and the implosion of the housing market that he had to address at the last minute.
The Economic Crisis of 2008 TM would have probably caused even FDR to pause. But then, I say he would have taken a moment, scrapped his script, and talked directly to the American people - kind of like Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin did during the vice presidential debate, except with actual things to say.
What surprised me, too, was that Obama did not impress upon us that his energy solution is a big part of his economic solution. All the right words were there, but we could barely hear them.
Tonight I want to hear him cut through the bull and give us a vision of what lies ahead.
Obama already has my vote. He is the clear choice for those of us who want to preserve the ways of science and reason as opposed to fear and superstition. But I’m still waiting for the poetry and the passion. Ronald Reagan may have run up the national debt, but he knew how to comfort the nation when the Challenger crew was lost forever.
I can’t say what it is exactly that Barack Obama needs to do. I haven’t been to leadership school. But I’ll know it when I see it.
