Leadership is becoming a lost political art

Political leadership today is being replaced by dysfunction in pursuit of policy

Leadership may be hard to define but easy to recognize. A lack of leadership is just as easy to recognize.

That lack of leadership was evident when a small cadre of conservative House Republicans dumped the leader they helped elect 10 months earlier to hold the federal government hostage to their legislative demands. Now, Republican moderates are returning the favor by refusing to vote for Jim Jordan, a founder of the House Freedom Caucus.

That action follows the same illogic as Oregon Senate Republicans walking out of a legislative session to deny a quorum, creating chaos in pursuit of policy. Burn-the-house-down politics only succeeds in breeding cynicism, undermining faith in democracy and dishonoring leadership.

Our constitutional democracy depends on leadership. Without it, the strength of constitutional fabric frays. Disillusionment takes over. Gridlock moves from inevitable to intentional, from an outcome to a tactic. In its most disfigured form, dysfunction becomes a means to an end.

We have a Constitution because our original system of government allowed local interests to prevail over the national interest. George Washington, the only President unanimously elected in the Electoral College, modeled constitutional leadership even as his top advisers advocated disparate views and divided into rival political parties to advance them.

Leadership isn’t uniformly respected or recognized today. Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy lost his job after exerting his leadership to negotiate with President Biden to prevent default on the national debt and with House Democrats to avoid a government shutdown. His detractors called those ‘leadership failures.’ Outside agitators like Steve Bannon called them political betrayals. McCarthy defended himself by saying, “I chose governance over grievance.”

As McCarthy’s Republican colleagues stewed over his replacement, Hamas attacked Israel, killing civilians and taking hostages. Biden quickly rallied to Israel’s defense, calling on Congress to approve military aid. The House Republican who stood up to support Biden’s request was McCarthy, who noted, “I can lead no matter what position I’m in.”

Leadership Example Closer to Home
Two Bend-area lawmakers exhibited leadership at a joint townhall meeting after the nearly derailed 2023 legislative session. Reps. Vikki Breese-Iverson, who served as House Republican Leader, and Emerson Levy, a freshman Democrat, talked about the hard work of compromise, especially on contentious issues like gun regulation.

“Your representative fought like heck where we all got to a place where we all lost something. I think that is important. I don’t think we want chaos. We want democracy.” Levy said. “Walkouts don’t serve the public. It means the public’s business doesn’t get done.”

Breese-Iverson defended her caucus decision not to walk out in concert with Senate Republicans. “The way that the Legislature and our founding fathers put our state together, we are supposed to have bills and a state budget that keeps our state moving forward,”. Breese-Iverson said. “If every time we get together we walk out … because there is something in front of us that we don’t like, then you stop everything, everything that the state does.” 

Breese-Iverson has stepped down as House Republican Leader.

Historical Leadership Examples
Doris Kearns Goodwin has made presidential leadership a historical genre. Her profiles of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson show the power of leadership along with its fragility. She shows these men were flesh and blood, talented and flawed but when tested under fire they rose to lead a nation. Her Team of Rivals demonstrates the strength of having allies and enemies work together on a major problem.

Goodwin worked for Johnson and saw first-hand his strengths and warts, which were visible in his inspired War on Poverty and his maniacal pursuit of the Vietnam War, offering proof leadership isn’t a forever gift or even a persistent trait.

Harry Truman could easily have been included in Goodwin’s reflections on presidential leadership. The most well-read U.S. senator with an unprepossessing appearance seemed like an unlikely leader. After FDR’s death, Truman became an accidental President who made momentous decisions to drop nuclear bombs on Japan, integrate the U.S. military, launch the Marshall recovery plan in Europe and fire the most popular American general of his generation for insubordination. Truman was first to propose what we now know as Medicare. He has gone down in history as one of America’s most decisive leaders.

But as Gary Ginsberg in First Friends describes, Truman could equivocate and on one significant occasion relied on a trusted friend for advice. Truman’s life-time friendship with Eddie Jacobson, a high school dropout who went from stockboy to clothing tycoon and who happened to be Jewish, proved critical to recognition of Israel . The author credits Jacobson for helping Truman overcome his own anti-Jewish views and the formidable opposition of General George Marshall to recognize the State of Israel just 11 minutes after David Ben-Gurion declared its formation in 1948. That recognition hasn’t faltered for 75 years.

Truman exhibited another admirable leadership trait – the ability to look forward, not backward. As a senator who served in World War I, Truman was assigned to lead a committee investigating waste and fraud in the military. In leader-like fashion, Truman operated the committee in a bipartisan manner, focusing on ways to save money in future military spending. With a budget of $360,000 over three years, the Truman Committee, as it became known, prevented an estimated $15 billion in wasteful military spending while significantly improving safety for U.S. service personnel.

When Truman left the White House in 1953, he was one of the most unpopular leaders of his era. Anti-communist red-baiters made sure of it. The longer lens of history has corrected that misperception.

While leadership may be easy to recognize, the qualities that make people leaders is hard to recognize in the moment, especially moments of high emotion and deep division. Undermining leadership can be confused as leadership. Failure to acknowledge and respect what it takes to lead can become an effective deterrent to actual leadership.

Gary Conkling has been a newsman, congressional aide and public affairs professional for more than 50 years.