ALL YA DO IS TALK, TALK:

Presidency a test of Obama's leadership model: Campaign offered hints, analysts say (Brian C. Mooney, January 17, 2009, Boston Globe)

"Some of his skills are transferable and they are significant ones," said David Gergen, a professor and program director at Harvard's Kennedy School who has served in four different administrations. "His capacity to move people through rhetoric, as he did during the campaign, is clearly a major asset in the presidency. Our most memorable presidents of the last 50 years have been wonderful communicators on television; one was John Kennedy and the other was Ronald Reagan.

"The other that's transferable, and in a very interesting way and an asset no Democrat has had in recent years, is the data base he has built up on the Internet," Gergen said. "That can be used to build grass-roots support for his legislative programs." [...]

Obama's leadership skills notwithstanding, many questions remain about his managerial credentials to preside over a sprawling government with about 1.6 million civilian employees, not to mention serve as commander-in-chief of armed forces 1.4 million strong. The 44th president has no prior executive experience or military background.

"The transition from campaign to governing will be a lot tougher in the managerial area," said Gergen, who worked in the Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton White Houses. "It's difficult to get a handle on it, and it is hard, messy work to reform the bureaucratic structures."

JFK gave several good speeches, but was a failure as a president. He could marry the words to neither ideas nor leadership skills. He'd have lost to Goldwater in '64.

Ronald Reagan succeeded not just because of his rhetoric and capacity generate letters to the Hill (last generation's Internet), but because he had a governing philosophy, experience as executive of a nation-sized state, and an agenda he was seeking to enact.

Bill Clinton gave awful speeches that were often effective politically. Meanwhile, his Third Way ideology and experience as governor of a Southern state served him well, once the GOP took control in 1994, because it prepared him to govern towards the Right.

Barrack Obama has no political philosophy to draw upon, no agenda to steer his Administration, and no experience as an executive. He, like Clinton, inherits a peace dividend--though smaller than the post-Cold War one--and an economy poised to boom again after a brief slowdown. But he also has the problem that ruined Bill Clinton's first two years, a Democratic Congress, aching to react against the conservative restoration. Whether or not his presidency succeeds will have rather little to do with his speeches and nothing to do with the netroots, but will be almost entirely dependent on how well he understands the Clinton presidency. If he tries being Clinton '93, he runs the risk of being a failed president. If he skips directly to Clinton '95, he will be a success.

The initial signs, from appointments, to backpedaling on nearly every campaign promise he made the Left, to cultivating relationships with Republicans and conservative pundits, suggests that he's already triangulating as Dick Morris would counsel him to do and looking to govern as a New Democrat. That affords ample reason to be hopeful about the coming years.

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Posted by Orrin Judd at January 17, 2009 8:27 AM