[Vision2020] Real Leadership Isn't Superficial

[Tom Hansen]

Stanley Crouch's column below appears today on a trial basis. Please e-
mail your reactions to dougf at spokesman.com

Please let the Spokesman Review know how you appreciate the sentiment 
inherent in Mr. Crouch's column by voicing your opinion to the above email 
address.

So many voices have fallen silent over these past few years.  Don't let us 
lose another one.

>From today's (May 16, 2008) Spokesman Review

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Real leadership isn't superficial
By Stanley Crouch

Nothing has been quite as exciting and as disappointing or even disgusting 
as the grand drama of this Democratic contest for the presidential 
nomination.

We have seen Barack Obama rise and, with a new tone, make biracial 
identity a public fact of American life. We have also seen Americans 
reinvigorated, surging with a refreshing patriotism that is fully aware of 
the country's shortcomings.

We have seen America's history of struggling toward fairness become, 
perhaps for the first time, a common heritage that crossed lines of color, 
class, religion, region and sexual identity.
 
In Obama's vision, every American can lay claim to the Constitution, to 
the abolition movement, to the destruction of the slavery system by the 
Civil War, to women getting the vote, to the collective bargaining made 
possible by organized labor, to the defeat of fascism and to the victories 
of the civil-rights movement. Obama made it clear that those were not the 
struggles and the victories of special-interest groups; they were 
struggles and victories that meant something particularly special because 
they deeply bettered the society at large. Huge audiences responded with a 
fervor usually reserved for a rock star.

As Patrick Buchanan predicted, the only hope for Obama's foes was to knock 
him off of his pedestal and into the mud-wrestling we have seen define our 
politics. But the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was the big bomb that didn't quite 
go off.

Wright's ethnic "Gong Show" – and the vast right-wing conspiracy that 
Hillary Clinton joined when she helped to give it credence – may have 
allowed Clinton to greasily slip through the door of victory in Indiana, 
but it raised issues that should make us stop on a dime.

Columbia- and Harvard-educated, bad-bowling Obama is an elite, the 
conservatives – and the Clintons – claim. He is out of touch with the 
working class, they say.

It has become commonplace for the predictable millionaire puppets of Fox 
News and their conservative talk radio counterparts to present themselves 
as the voices of the working class in combat with an educated elite from 
places like Harvard.

But beneath those clichés fester ideas that are deeply anti-democratic.

They are anti-democratic because they scoff at this basic truth: Education 
is the key to social mobility in our country. The stereotyped working 
class has no innate limits. It has produced the majority of doctors, 
engineers, architects, educators and others who realized the dreams of 
their families by studying hard and moving into careers quite different 
from those of their parents and their neighbors.

Education has always been viewed as suspect by everyone from slave owners 
to totalitarians. Wherever in the world you find them, they share one 
hostility: They hate books.

The presidency is not an Academy Award for Best Performance as a bowler, a 
fast-food gobbler, a whiskey and beer guzzler, a hard-hat wearer or a 
hunter. We ought to be well aware of how far leadership capabilities are 
from surfaces, slogans, regional accents and costumes.

And we should be ever suspicious of anyone or any group that scorns 
education, that pretends to believe that only the simple and the 
uncomplicated can express the national ethos.

That is absolutely ridiculous in a country from which so much 
technological and scientific innovation has come. Tell that to Thomas 
Edison or the Wright brothers – neither of them were from the upper class. 
Or are we to believe they were just simple men looking for a loud bar, a 
bowling alley and a cold beer?

The precious opportunity that our democracy provides is the chance to 
stop, look, listen and think through all that history has taught us about 
the bottom and about the top.

Real leadership is something internal, not superficial, and should be 
judged by substance, policy and solutions that are empathetic but 
realistic, inventive, fiscally responsible and feasible. No one knows the 
taste of pie in the sky, but we have all felt and smelled the putrid 
humidity of hot air. 

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Seeya round town, Moscow.

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho


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