Not Even Talking the Talk
Here’s the thing. When I look at who’s running for office these days, I don’t see but scant glimmers of reason for hope for the future. This is not to say that the future depends on politicians, but if it did, I’d probably not be terribly upbeat about our prospects. That’s because we have had a remarkable paucity of true leaders. That’s because for the past thirty years, most of the candidates we’ve seen have been seeking office for the title rather than for what they might do with it.
The motivation to lead must be the desire for accomplishment, not puerile self-aggrandizement. So what if you’re president or majority leader, governor or legislator. What did you get done? And when you look at where we are and where we were, the answer, fairly obviously for virtually every politician who’s held statewide or federal office is nada. Sure there are some exceptions; some wonderful individuals have done some miraculous things. But even most of those people have had the potential of their efforts washed out or outright quashed in the process of implementation.
Bush and Gore are running to win, but neither of them seems the slightest bit driven by what he might accomplish once elected. Neither has suggested a passion that is pushing him to a position where he might do something about it. They both hen-scratch around the center of every issue, trying to offend the fewest number of people on either side. They tiptoe between the core constituency and the independents, hoping to woo more than they put off. Indeed, their sole purpose — hey, ya gotta get there before you do something — is to win the election, when instead if they were true leaders they would be generating a widespread coalition to support a mandate.
A real leader would put away some of the issues that we’ve been arguing about ceaselessly and which arguments keep us from stepping up to new and larger issues that are lurking ominously ahead. For instance, the problems of over-population, nuclear waste disposal, and a flood-tide of ill-equipped children.
We have settled for second-rate politicians for so long we don’t remember what true leadership might even look like. The most popular president of modern times slept through most of his two terms; the Great Communicator was a fatherly figurehead who there-there’d the willing masses into somnolent complacency, while his friends looted the treasury. Bush’s claim to fame is the Gulf War, which, judging from the fact that we are still bombing Saddam on a daily basis was hardly a commanding victory, if a victory at all.
Clinton has done little but surf the economic wave created by the Internet albeit to mile-high approval figures. He has no legacy other than his sordid affair with Monica Lewinsky, and impeachment for perjury.
Carter was ineffectual for the most part, Ford will always be known as a bumbler, Nixon was a liar and a crook, Johnson got us into Vietnam, Kennedy was killed before we could find out if he was a white knight, and Ike was the ex-general. We haven’t had the semblance of a leader in half-a century. Curious that we should continue to bind ourselves in a system that prevents someone of capability, intellect, and vision from rising to the fore. This skating on posterity can’t last forever.
And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.