(The Context Of) Obama's Last, Best Hope

Today, the BBC offered an interview with Professor Joseph Nye (Harvard) who opined that the best presidents had "contextual intelligence." Unsurprisingly, The Dubster has zero contextual intelligence. Nye upholds Dwight Eisenhower as a prime example of contextual intelligence: mastery of the hierarchy of Army command, service as president of Columbia University without incident, and two terms as president of the United States. The source of this tour d'force was Ike's contextual intelligence. During the BBC interview, professor Nye said that Ike rated a 10 in contextual intelligence. It is no coincidence that Eisenhower's political nickname, "Ike," was commonplace. Nye granted The Hillster and the The Geezer scores of 7. And, The Hopester? Nye gave him a 9 for his life's journey from interracial origins abroad, his editorship of The Harvard Law Review, his work as a community organizer on Chicago's South Side, and the audacity of his candidacy for the presidency as a first-term U.S. Senator. The problem here is that most voters want to fix on gutter balls in a bowling alley or the lack of a flag pin on his lapel; contextual intelligence is not a LIS (low information signal). If this is a (fair & balanced) national tragedy, so be it.

[x Financial Times]
Good Leadership Is Deciding How To Decide
By Joseph Nye

George W. Bush has famously described his leadership role as “the decider”. But deciding how to decide is as important as making the final decision. What should be the composition of the group the leader turns to? What is the context of the decision? How will information be communicated and how much control does the leader maintain over the decision? A leader who gets any of these factors wrong may be decisive, but also decisively wrong.

The US president described his leadership style as having three core components: outline a vision, build a strong team and delegate much of the process to them. His decision-making on Iraq, however, has been criticised for the grandiosity of his vision, failure to manage the divisions in his team and failure to monitor the delegation of decisions. Without contextual intelligence, being a “decider” is not enough.

Understanding context is crucial to effective leadership. Some situations call for autocratic decisions and some require the opposite. There is an infinite variety of contexts in which leaders have to operate, but it is particularly important for leaders to understand culture, the distribution of power, followers’ needs and demands, time urgency and information flows.

Ronald Heifetz, the leadership theorist, argues that the first thing a leader needs to diagnose is whether the situation calls for technical and routine solutions or requires adaptive change. In the former case, the leader may want to clarify roles and norms, restore order and quickly provide a solution. In the latter case, the leader may want to let conflict emerge, challenge unproductive norms and roles and let the group feel external pressures so that it learns to master the adaptive challenge. This may require delaying decisions. Leaders are often tempted to decide quickly to reduce followers’ anxieties rather than to use these anxieties as a learning experience. This is a very different image of leadership from simply being “the decider”.

General Electric prides itself on producing leaders, but half of its high-flyers who went on to become chief executives of other Fortune 500 companies had disappointing records. Why do some leaders succeed in one context and fail in another? A common answer is “horses for courses”: some run better on a dry track and some in mud. Many a good CEO turns out to be a disappointment when appointed as a cabinet secretary.

Contextual intelligence is an intuitive skill that helps a leader align tactics with objectives to create smart strategies in new situations. It implies a capability to discern trends in the face of complexity as well as adaptability in trying to shape events. Bismarck once referred to this as the ability to intuit God’s movements in history and seize the hem of his garment as he sweeps by. More prosaically, like surfers, leaders with contextual intelligence have the judgment to adjust to new waves and ride them to success.

Contextual intelligence allows leaders to adjust their style to the situation and their followers’ needs. It enables them to create flows of information that “educate their hunches”. It involves the broad political skill not only of sizing up group politics, but also of understanding the positions and strengths of various stakeholders so as to decide when and how to use trans actional and inspirational skills. It is the self-made part of luck.

In unstructured situations, it is often more difficult to ask the right questions than to get the right answer. Leaders with contextual intelligence are skilled at providing meaning by defining the problem that a group confronts. They understand the tension between the different values involved in an issue and how to balance the desirable with what is feasible.

Psychologists generally agree that multiple forms of intelligence exist. What we today measure as IQ was originally developed a century ago in the context of the French school system. Thus it focuses on linguistic, mathematical and spatial skills that tend to predict success in school, but not necessarily in life. Contextual intelligence consists partly of analytic capabilities and partly of tacit knowledge built up from experience, which tends to be expressed in rules of thumb. In some situations, such “street smarts” are much more important to success than “school smarts”. But as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the two Democratic presidential rivals, have recently debated, in novel situations judgment is more important than experience.

Contextual intelligence also requires emotional intelligence. Without sensitivity to the needs of others, pure cognitive analysis and long experience may prove insufficient for effective leadership. Ronald Reagan was often faulted on his cognitive skills, but he generally had good contextual intelligence. Jimmy Carter had good cognitive skills, but was often faulted on his contextual intelligence. As one wag put it, he was better at counting the trees than seeing the forest.

The best leaders are able to transfer their skills across contexts. Dwight Eisenhower, for example, was successful both as a military leader and as a president. Many leaders have a fixed repertoire of skills, which limit and condition their responses to new situations. To use an information age metaphor, they need to develop broader bandwidth and tune carefully for different situations. That set of skills is contextual intelligence. Leaders need to learn it and, especially this year, voters need to judge it.

[Joseph S Nye, Jr. is University Distinguished Service Professor in the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and author, most recently, of The Powers to Lead (2008).]
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Copyright © 2008 The Financial Times Limited 2008

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Uh, Oh! Stick A Fork In Obama?

Joe Klein introduced me to Professor Samuel L. Popkin (University of California at San Diego) and the concept of "low information signaling" in political campaigns. According to Popkin (in The Reasoning Voter), most voters make their electoral decision over stupid things like bowling a 37 or (not) wearing a flag pin. Klein mentions Michael Dukakis in a tanker's helmet, John Kerry's chosen sport of wind-surfing, and Al Gore's audible sighs during a debate in 2000. Klein should have included The Trickster's upper-lip-perspiration and darting eyes in 1960. He also should have included Jerry Ford's attempt to eat a tamale in San Antonio without removing the corn-shuck wrapper in 1976. A classic LIS (low information signaling)-moment occurred with Poppy Bush (41) checked his watch during a debate in 1992 while The Slickster was droning on about whatever. On the opposite side of the coin, The Slickster mastered LIS by wearing shades and blowing into a saxophone on "The Arsenio Hall Show." Eating a Big Mac didn't hurt The Slickster, either. Now, we have The Hillster knocking back shots of Crown Royal and getting teary-eyed when another woman asked "How do you do it?" The Hillster does it (as does her husband), according to Klein, because she's a "robo-pol." Terminator-like, she'll be back to tell The Hopester, "Hasta la vista, baby." If this is a (fair & balanced) political obituary, so be it.

[x Time]
The Incredibly Shrinking Democrats
By Joe Klein

"This election," Bill Clinton said in the hours before the Pennsylvania primary, "is too big to be small." It was a noble sentiment, succinctly stated, and the core of what Democrats believe — that George W. Bush has been a historic screwup as President, that there are huge issues to be confronted this year. But it was laughable as well. The Pennsylvania primary had been a six-week exercise in diminution, with both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama — and Bill Clinton too — losing altitude and esteem on an almost daily basis. Even as he spoke, the former President was in the midst of a tiny, self-inflicted absurdity, having claimed in a radio interview that the Obama campaign had played the "race card" against him. And that was the least of the damage.

Hillary Clinton won a convincing victory in Pennsylvania, but it came at a significant cost to the Clinton family's reputation and to the Democratic Party. She won by throwing the "kitchen sink" at Obama, as her campaign aides described it. Her campaign had been an assault on Obama's character flaws, real and imagined, rather than on matters of substance. Clinton also suffered a bizarre self-inflicted wound, having reimagined her peaceful landing at a Bosnian airstrip in 1996 as a battlefield scene complete with sniper fire. After six weeks of this, according to one poll, 60% of the American people considered her "untrustworthy," a Nixonian indictment.

But that was nothing compared with the damage done to Obama, who entered the primary as a fresh breeze and left it stale, battered and embittered — still the mathematical favorite for the nomination but no longer the darling of his party. In the course of six weeks, the American people learned that he was a member of a church whose pastor gave angry, anti-American sermons, that he was "friendly" with an American terrorist who had bombed buildings during the Vietnam era, and that he seemed to look on the ceremonies of working-class life — bowling, hunting, churchgoing and the fervent consumption of greasy food — as his anthropologist mother might have, with a mixture of cool detachment and utter bemusement. All of which deepened the skepticism that Caucasians, especially those without a college degree, had about a young, inexperienced African-American guy with an Islamic-sounding name and a highfalutin fluency with language. And worse, it raised questions among the elders of the party about Obama's ability to hold on to crucial Rust Belt bastions like Pennsylvania, Michigan and New Jersey in the general election — and to add long-suffering Ohio to the Democratic column.

Yes, yes, the bulk of the sludge was caricature, and some of it, especially the stuff circulating on the Internet, was scurrilous trash. But there is an immutable pedestrian reality to American politics: you have to get the social body language right if you want voters to consider the nobler reaches of your message. In his 1991 book, The Reasoning Voter, political scientist Samuel Popkin argued that most people make their choice on the basis of "low-information signaling" — that is, stupid things like whether you know how to roll a bowling ball or wear an American-flag pin. In the era of Republican dominance, the low-information signals were really low — how Michael Dukakis looked in a tanker's helmet, whether John Kerry's favorite sports were too precious (like wind-surfing), whether Al Gore's debate sighs over his opponent's simple obfuscations were patronizing. Bill Clinton was the lone Democratic master of low-information signaling — a love of McDonald's and other assorted big-gulp appetites gave him credibility that even trumped his evasion of military service.

The audacity of the Obama campaign was the belief that in a time of trouble — as opposed to the peace and prosperity of the late 20th century — the low-information politics of the past could be tossed aside in favor of a high-minded, if deliberately vague, appeal to the nation's need to finally address some huge problems. But that assumption hit a wall in Pennsylvania. Specifically, it hit a wall at the debate staged by ABC News in Philadelphia — viewed by an audience of 10 million, including a disproportionate number of Pennsylvanians — that will go down in history for the relentless vulgarity of its questions, with the first 40 minutes focused exclusively on so-called character issues rather than policy. Obama was on the defensive from the start, but gradually the defensiveness morphed into bitter frustration. He kept his cool — a very presidential character trait — and allowed his disdain to show only when he was asked a question about his opponent's Bosnia gaffe. "Senator Clinton deserves the right to make some errors once in a while," he said. "What's important is to make sure that we don't get so obsessed with gaffes that we lose sight of the fact that this is a defining moment in our history."

It is the transcendent irony of this campaign that Obama, who entered the race intent on getting past the "dorm fights of the '60s," has now become deeply entangled in them. Each of the ABC moderators' questions were about controversies that erupted in the '60s. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright's black-nationalist sermons had their roots in the black-power movement that corrupted Martin Luther King Jr.'s "beloved community." The sprouting of flag pins on the lapels of politicians was a response to the flag-burning of antiwar protesters; the violence of Weather Underground members like William Ayers, with whom Obama was said to be "friendly," was a corruption of the peace movements as well. All of these occurred before Obama reached puberty — and they helped define the social atmosphere in academic communities like Chicago's Hyde Park, where Obama now lives. For 40 years, the Republican Party has feasted on the secular humanism, feminism, distrust of the military and permissiveness that caricature such communities. For 40 years, the Democratic Party has been burdened by its inability to break free of those stereotypes.

Obama's challenge to the primacy of that sort of politics is both worthy and essential. His point, and Bill Clinton's, is indisputable: there is a need for a big election this year. A decision has to be made about the war in Iraq. The mortgage-market and the health-insurance systems are falling apart. There is a drastic need to wean ourselves off fossil fuels for national-security, environmental and basic supply-and-demand reasons. The physical and educational infrastructures of the country are badly outdated. In order to have an election about those big challenges, we need to shove some serious social issues — like gun control and, yes, even abortion — and phony character issues to the periphery. But Obama is going about it the wrong way. "After 14 long months," he said in his concession speech, "it's easy to get caught up in the distractions and the silliness and the tit for tat that consumes our politics, the bickering that none of us are immune to, and it trivializes the profound issues." What's wrong with that, you might ask? It's too abstract, too detached. Too often, Obama has seemed unwilling to get down in the muck and fight off the "distractions" that are crippling his campaign. Obviously, this is strategy — his appeal has been the promise of a politics of civility (and as a black man, he wants to send low-information signals that he is neither angry nor threatening). But what if, after ABC had enabled the smarmy American-flag-pin question from an "average citizen," Obama had taken on George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson directly, "Why aren't you guys wearing pins? Why isn't Hillary?" Indeed, this was Clinton's strategy in an earlier debate, upbraiding her questioners from MSNBC — and it may have turned the tide in her favor in Ohio and Texas.

In the last days of the Pennsylvania campaign, Obama made a halfhearted attempt to go negative. He ran ads distorting Clinton's health-care plan, claiming that it would force everyone to get health insurance (true), even if they couldn't afford it (false). He devoted more and more of his stump speech to slagging Clinton. "She's got the kitchen sink flying, the china flying — the buffet is coming at me," he said during a whistle-stop tour of southeastern Pennsylvania. His delivery of the kitchen-sink line was droll, but the rest of the tour was surprisingly soporific. He seemed fed up with campaigning — as any reasonably sane human being would be at this point — and embittered by the turn the race had taken.

I'm not sure that Bill and Hillary Clinton are reasonably sane human beings, at least not when they are running for office: they become robo-pols, tireless and seemingly indestructible. Senator Clinton was on fire in the days before the Pennsylvania primary, as energized as I've ever seen her. She barely mentioned Obama at all but fiercely plowed her latest field — the populist granddaughter of a Pennsylvania factory worker, the daughter of a Penn State football player. As she said in her victory speech, "You know, tonight, all across Pennsylvania and America, teachers are grading papers, and doctors and nurses are caring for the sick, and you deserve a leader who listens to you. Waitresses are pouring coffee, and police officers are standing guard, and small businesses are working to meet that payroll. And you deserve a champion who stands with you."

There was a warmth and a feistiness to Clinton in Pennsylvania — the very qualities that Obama was lacking. She had embraced the shameless rituals of politics, including some classic low-information signals, downing shots of Crown Royal and promising lower gas prices, attacking her opponent over trivia and threatening to "obliterate" Iran. It was enough to earn the ire of the New York Times editorial page, which harrumphed, "By staying on the attack and not engaging Mr. Obama on the substance of issues ... she undercuts the rationale for her candidacy that led this page and others to support her: that she is more qualified, right now, to be President."

Well, tsk-tsk and ahem! But part of the problem with editorial writers — and, truth to tell, columnists like me — is a narrow definition of the qualifications necessary to be President. It helps to be a warrior, for one thing. It helps to be able to take a punch and deliver one — even, sometimes, a sucker punch. A certain familiarity with life as it is lived by normal Americans is useful; a distance from the élite precincts of academia, where unrepentant terrorists can sip wine in good company, is essential. Hillary Clinton has learned these lessons the hard way; Barack Obama thinks they are "the wrong lessons." The nomination is, obviously, his to lose. But the presidency will not be won if he doesn't learn that the only way to reach the high-minded conversation he wants, and the country badly needs, is to figure out how to maneuver his way through the gutter.

[Joe Klein is a longtime Washington, D.C. and New York journalist and columnist, known for his novel Primary Colors (1996), an anonymously-written roman à clef portraying Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign. Klein is currently a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and is a former Guggenheim Fellow. Since 2003 he has been a contributor at Time magazine. In April 2006, he published Politics Lost, a book on what he calls the "pollster-consultant industrial complex". He has also written articles and book reviews for The New Republic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, LIFE and Rolling Stone.]

Copyright © 2008 Time, Inc.

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Roll Over, Ralph Ellison!

Colson Whitehead's Op-Ed piece in today's NY Fishwrap is why I post entries to this blog. In these times, a laugh out loud (LOL) moment is as precious as a gallon of gas, a pound of rice, or a superdelegate endorsement. This blog is brought to you courtesy of The Guy Who’s Where He Is Only Because He’s Black Bald. If this is (fair & balanced) satire, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Visible Man
By Colson Whitehead

I try to keep a low profile. Maybe you see me in the hallway but don’t know my name. Say hi to me in the coffee room but don’t really know me. I break my silence now because of this election mess. Before the primary in Pennsylvania this week, Bill Clinton was doing magic tricks — now you see the race card, now you don’t. Geraldine Ferraro and Bob Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television, have been complaining that Barack Obama is leading in the Democratic presidential campaign only because of his skin color. Multimillionaire TV pundits are lecturing “the common man” on how outraged they should be about Mr. Obama’s elitism.

It’s all hokum, and I should know. For it is I, The Guy Who’s Where He Is Only Because He’s Black.

Most folks don’t know much about me, apart from the feeling of injustice that hits when I walk into the room with my easy charisma and air of entitlement. I understand. It’s weird when your government passes legislation, like equal opportunity laws, that benefits one single person in the country — me, The Guy Who Got Where He Is Only Because He’s Black.

People think I have it easy, but it’s surprisingly difficult being The Guy Who Got Where He Is Only Because He’s Black, what with the whole having to be everywhere in the country at once thing. One second I’m nodding enthusiastically in a sales conference in Boise, Idaho, and the next I’m separating conjoined triplets at the Institute For Terribly Complicated Surgery in Buchanan, N.Y., and then I have to rush out to Muncie, Ind., to put my little “Inspector 12” tag in a bag of Fruit of the Loom.

It’s exhausting, all that travel. Decent, hard-working folks out there have their religion and their xenophobia to cling to. All I have is a fistful of upgrades to first class and free headphones. Headphones That Should Have Gone to a More Deserving Passenger.

Guns? I wish I had a gun! Ever run out of truffle oil before a dinner party and have to go to Whole Foods on a weekend? It’ll make you want to spread a little buckshot around, that’s for sure.

Look, we’re all hurting, trying to make ends meet. I have serious overhead with all the résumés I send out. The postage is one thing, but I also like to print my résumé on a nice creamy bond. I think it sends a message. Then there’s the dry cleaning and the soap — I prefer to be clean and articulate in my interviews, put my best foot forward. I think it’s working. People are responding to how I present myself.

I know some folks feel bitter about me, as bitter as the first dandelion greens of the season. Yet these people are not without hope, hope that is drizzled on those dandelion greens like a dash of sweet pomegranate vinegar. Do they begrudge the scorpion its sting, or the duck its quack? How can I be other than what I am, The Guy Who Got Where He Is Only Because He’s Black?

Frankly it’s a lot better than my last two gigs, The Guy Who Left the Seat Up and The Guy Who Took the Last Beer, although I do suffer from a lot of work-related injuries, as you can imagine. For all this jibber-jabber about how I don’t understand a working man’s problems, you should take a look at my medical chart. I have carpal tunnel, tennis elbow, miner’s lung, scapegoat rash and vintner’s dropsy, and just last week I burned my thumb making horseshoes. The funny thing is, I didn’t want to be a blacksmith. But I heard they had an opening and I couldn’t help myself.

I put in a good day’s work, unwind with a little Marx, and then settle down for some well-deserved rest. I have a nice bed. It is a California king. It is stuffed with gold doubloons, the treasure I have accumulated by gathering the bonuses and raises that would have gone to Those Who Would’ve Gotten It Except for That Black Guy. The bed is quite comfortable. I sleep O.K.

It makes the head spin, this talk of who’s elitist and who’s not. I’m confused, myself. For years, they said you can’t have this because you’re black, and then when you get something the same people say you got that only because you’re black. I mean, here I am, The Guy Who Got Where He Is Only Because He’s Black, and yet the higher up you go in an organization, the less you see of me.

It’s as if Someone Out to Prevent Me From Getting What I Worked For is preventing me from getting what I worked for. If only there were something — a lapel pin or other sartorial accessory — that would reassure people that I can do the job.

Some people say Barack Obama and I get everything handed to us on a silver platter. But we don’t let it bother us. We’re taking those silver platters and making them our canoes. Then we’ll grab our silver spoons and paddle to a place where people get us. North Carolina, maybe. Or Indiana. I hear Oregon is nice this time of year. We’ll paddle on, brother, paddle all the way to the top.

[Colson Whitehead (full name Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead) is a New York-based novelist. In 2002, he received a MacArthur Fellowship, often referred to as the MacArthur "Genius" grant. He was born in New York City in 1969, attended the Trinity School in New York, and graduated from Harvard College in 1991. He is a journalist whose work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, Salon, and The Village Voice. Whitehead, a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, is the author of the forthcoming novel Sag Harbor. That novel will be Whitehead's fifth, following The Intuitionist (1999), John Henry Days (2001), The Colossus of New York (2003), and Apex Hides the Hurt (2006).]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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