Here we can read FDR’s first inaugural address, delivered March 4, 1933, and hear him take the oath of office. All current candidates, and especially the Democratic ones, ought to study this text very closely.
Richard Parker’s piece on FDR is very much worth reading at the present juncture in our national history. I would also like the administrators at my university to study and imitate his leadership style, as described by Parker:
“Few historians today think FDR had a finely tuned policy agenda in the back of his mind at any point during his twelve years in the White House. What he did have, though, was worth far more. Eliot Janeway, looking at FDR’s oft-criticized record in preparing the nation for war–and for what became the swiftest, most enormous and most complex expansion of the economy and the government in America’s history–named what was essential.
“Roosevelt’s critics have said–and say–he organized Washington into…a comptroller’s hell, into a jungle of confusion…. They are right. He did. And yet this irresponsibility–so disastrous on the face of it–did not result in disaster…. To Roosevelt, the important question was the participation of the nation in its own defense, not the administrative planning for this participation…. So long as the home front was big at the base, Roosevelt was willing to bet he could let it be confused at the top–and he and he alone had the power, the genius, the dramatic instinct, and above all the daring to make it as big outside Washington and as amorphous inside Washington as he pleased.
“It’s those qualities – his ability to project a sense of trust in people’s ability to rise to common needs and dreams, plus his capacity as democratic leader to help them find the means needed to triumph – that defined Roosevelt’s genius. And it’s crucial for us to recognize why his style of “democratic leadership” was and is more challenging than “leadership of a democracy” or of business leadership or military leadership or most kinds of political leadership touted as “what we need today.” Crucial among the gifts of a true democratic leader, as FDR clearly was, is the ability to share not so much policies but stories, parables that incorporate moral and ethical vision, narratives of who we are and where we came from, and why we are together and where we can go, and what we can achieve if we work together.”
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That was about university politics. On Presidential politics, consider:
That was Barack Obama talking about being talked about as elitist because of having said that regular Americans were pushed by circumstances and rhetoric into reaction when really their actual sentiments and interests may well be more progressive than they are able to see.
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Also in Presidential politics and presidencies, there is a great deal of new and revolting news about Bush, the Bush administration, and torture. It is nothing we did not know in general terms, but the details – about the administration’s attitude and its manipulativeness – are truly nauseating. What I most dislike is that they know their rhetoric is false, but that it will convince some people and discourage others so much that with so many either convinced or discouraged, there will be insufficient information and less opposition. It is all so exploitative, and so demeaning – to the people of this country and of the world at large. And then people say Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright are the “mean” and “offensive” ones.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 