Pay attention to leadership style

This week gave us a chance to contrast the leadership styles on both the Republican and Democratic sides of the presidential race. Leadership style isn't the only important basis for choosing a president, but it is a factor we can readily evaluate. Here are some example styles we see in this year's race:

• The inspiring leader, someone who uses their charisma, life story, and values to set a clear direction. This kind of candidate transcends the limited power of the Federal government by motivating us to help change the world for the better, far beyond what the government can possibly do.
• The technician, someone who wants to be CEO of the Federal government and understands the business inside and out. This kind of candidate tries to convince us that they can make the government work more effectively and efficiently, and that they won't make any big mistakes.
• The ideologue, someone who read a very convincing book written by someone who has never been in government, and is now completely certain they have the simple formula to solve every problem.
• The complainer, who can list everything that is wrong in the world and can identify one or more groups that are responsible for all these ills. There's an implication that the candidate might have solutions to the problems, but these solutions are rarely stated, leaving it up to the voter's imagination.
• The empty suit, who has no particular skills or direction but tries to win by not offending anyone, by being a blank screen on which the voters can project their desires.

The best object lesson on leadership style came to us this week courtesy of Tom Tancredo. From the articles in the newspaper over the past couple of days, you might have thought Tancredo had died. The eulogies from all sides of the political spectrum described at worst a bigot, at best an ineffective seat-warmer in the House of Representatives. In fact, Mr. Tancredo is still among the living, and will be a sitting member of Congress for another year.

Tancredo made a show of meeting with the other Republican candidates for president, looking for someone who would "carry on the fight" for him so he could drop out of the presidential race. He decided on Mitt Romney, and gave his endorsement. Romney, who was pointedly absent from Tancredo's news conference, said shortly after that he appreciated the endorsement, even though "I don't agree with him on every issue." Romney was not specific on the areas of agreement or disagreement, and quickly changed the subject. He effectively blew off Tancredo and committed to nothing, thus tossing Tancredo's years-long quest onto the scrap heap.

Tancredo made this momentous (for him) mistake because he didn't understand leadership styles. In the above list, you can easily recognize Tancredo as a combination of ideologue and complainer. To find someone to carry on the fight for him, what he needed most was someone compatible with his libertarian and nativist ideology, who hated Mexicans as much as Tancredo. But Romney isn't any of these things. Romney is the classic empty suit, whose whole campaign strategy is to bob and weave so no opponent can get a glove on him.

Tancredo could have, and should have, known that Romney would respond in this way. Maybe he was trying to draw Romney out as a nativist, but that would be a long shot, and would destroy Romney's campaign since he would no longer be viewed as neutral in Republican ideological wars. Tancredo didn't really have any better choices. Ron Paul has Tancredo's libertarian streak but is a fellow fringe candidate and doesn't hate Mexicans. Fred Thompson hates Mexicans but isn't libertarian. Perhaps the best chance Tancredo might have had would be to announce a "draft Lou Dobbs" movement, since Dobbs is both an ideologue and complainer, but has a much bigger megaphone.

Here in Douglas County, Republicans would be wise to pay attention to leadership styles of the remaining candidates. I was looking through campaign finance reports yesterday, and noticed that the leading Douglas County fund-raiser among Republicans, by a mile, is Romney. These donors might not remember another classic empty suit candidate in the 2000 election, one named George W. Bush. As we now know, Bush has presided over the biggest expansion of the size and scope of government in US history. One doesn't have to be an advocate of government spending to become a profligate spender. For an empty suit, who doesn't want to offend anyone, offering money is the path of least resistance. If Romney is elected, more government expansion is inevitable. Republicans who donate to Romney or vote for him in the caucus should have their eyes wide open that this is what they are voting for. Pay attention to what he does, not necessarily what he says.

Pulling weeds

The beautiful Wyoming prairie has a big fat weed needing to be pulled. John Millin is precisely the kind of guy who should never be allowed to speak for the Democratic Party. The Wyoming Democratic Party Chair wrote an inexplicable letter to the Denver (yes, it's in Colorado) Post this week. Referring to Sen. Hillary Clinton, Millin said,

"Every Democratic candidate in Wyoming will be painted with that same liberal, big-government brush. We will also be the target of the locker room jokes that rightfully belong to Bill Clinton," John Millin wrote in a letter to The Denver Post.

Now I've been very careful this year to avoid taking sides in the presidential primary. With the amazing crop of candidates we have, I'm convinced that whoever we nominate will win the General Election and be an excellent president. Colorado Chair Pat Waak has also been careful to stay neutral. This is smart.

In one quick letter Millin committed five fatal errors, any of which should have the Wyoming Central Committee looking for a replacement for their embarrassing geographically-challenged Chair:

• He announced that he is not willing to support a person who has a reasonably good chance of becoming the party nominee. This is not strictly a violation of the rules, unless he decides to actively support the Republican nominee. But from here on Millin is a member of one candidate's campaign and not a leader of the Party as a whole.
• He alienated a majority of his volunteers. By aligning himself with one candidate and bad-mouthing another, he positions himself as an antagonist to most of the active volunteers who support other candidates. He will be powerless to bring the party back together after the primaries.
• He attempted to sabotage not only the Clinton campaign, but every Democratic campaign by using right-wing framing to repeat a Limbaugh lie ("big-government") about Democratic presidents. As anyone who can add two and two should know by now, of all the presidents in US history, the two who are most responsible for the growth of government during their terms are both Republicans, Reagan and Bush Jr.
• He reinforced a right-wing slander on the most recent, highly successful Democratic president, Bill Clinton. By suggesting that "locker room jokes" have any meaningful impact on who should be elected president, he denies the Democratic philosophy that issues and results are what matter.
• Apparently not content to sow discord just in his own state, he sent a letter to a major newspaper in our state to try to try to create divisions here.

Even as a campaign operative, Millin is incompetent. How many Democratic votes can he hope to win, by repeating Republican talking points that have already been soundly rejected by his target audience? The only purpose his comments can serve is to energize the campaign he's trying to harm. I hope he kept his day job.

Now replacing a State Party Chair is not the easiest thing in the world. It's a thankless pay-less job and anyone who would take it deserves a great deal of appreciation. A State Party Chair can be a great asset, a source of Party growth, as has happened in Colorado. Or he can be an obstacle and source of dysfunction, as Millin now must be.

It must be frustrating to be a County Chair today in Wyoming. Their leader doesn't understand his job, and his lack of horsesense threatens all the work they have been doing at the county level. The Democratic Party is home to a diversity of viewpoints, and a Chairperson has to be leader for all of them. A State Chair's job is to build a sense of unity and strength from diversity. Most Chairpeople understand the job, work hard at it, and are good at it. But even in the best garden you get an occasional weed.

All I can say to the Wyoming Democratic Central Committee, as a word of advice from past experience of other states, is don't delay the inevitable. It will only get worse. John Millin obviously doesn't deserve or want to be Chair of the entire Wyoming Democratic Party. Put him out of his misery, now.

US Senate primary?

I see in Colorado Confidential that Mark Benner is talking about mounting a primary challenge against Mark Udall in the US Senate race. I heard it yesterday at the State Democratic Central Committee meeting as well. Benner wants to have a debate about universal health care, about holding Bush and Cheney accountable for their lack of respect for the law, and about the Congress' lack of progress on torture, Iraq, and the environment.

I wish him luck. It's a debate we need badly, but I'm not sure we really do debates any more. Even the presidential debates we see on TV aren't really debates, so much as a sequence of commercials. Udall, as respectful as he might personally be for Benner's concerns, will receive unanimous advice from his campaign staff that he ignore Benner. And he will. If we had a functioning traditional press in Colorado it might pick up the story, but we don't and it won't. I hope at least Colorado Confidential will follow it.

I had occasion to talk briefly with Udall at the Arapahoe County Democrats' Pat Schroeder Dinner a couple of weeks ago. (And I thank Arapahoe Chair Mike Hamrick for a great dinner and for seating me with Udall at the last minute.) Udall says he likes the idea of universal health care in principle, but he doesn't know how to get there from here. He says the forces lined up against it in Congress are too strong.

Udall didn't elaborate on that last point, but he didn't need to. The health insurance industry, as I've pointed out, serves no purpose in the US economy other than income redistribution. Of each dollar we spend on health insurance premiums, 70 cents go to doctors, hospitals, medicine, etc.; and 30 cents go into insurance company coffers to use however they like, on second-guessing doctors or political activism as the spirit moves. That's a lot of cash flow available to use as needed to defeat political opponents.

How do you fight that? The business community — the companies that pay the health insurance premiums and get nothing out of it besides a competitive handicap relative to foreign competitors — has that kind of money. But they're too busy fighting the bogeymen of the past, labor unions and taxes, both of which are no real threat. You can chalk that up to the dinosaur leadership of the business community, that has long since overstayed its usefulness; people who will go to their graves or bankruptcy court denying that globalization should have any real effect on their behavior.

I think Udall under-estimates a powerful ally, the one that supplies the money to US businesses, money that these businesses in turn pass through to the insurance industry. The ally he is ignoring, is the American consumer. How do you get from the broken, expensive health care system we have now, to more efficient universal health care? Competition, that's how. Specifically, competition between health insurance companies and the most efficient health insurance provider in America, Medicare.

Setting up this competition doesn't require thousands of pages of legislation. It's a lot simpler than that. Let each consumer choose whether to obtain insurance from the private market, or from Medicare. Let them keep the difference in cash. For entrepreneurs, the self-employed, and contract employees who don't receive insurance coverage from employers, just give us the option to buy our insurance from Medicare if we want to do so. That's all. No mandates, just give us the option. We'll take it from there.

This should be a familiar strategy. The business community destroyed organized labor through right-to-work laws, that in effect divided up the support for labor by offering workers their share of the cost of that institution, in cash. How about a different kind of right-to-work law, to apply that divide-and-conquer strategy to the health insurance industry? Force down the cost of health care by means of good old American competition.

Those of us who are close to the policy wonk community, tend to see the big issues of the time, especially health care, to be endlessly complex. And they are complex. But to gain the allegiance and power of the consumer, we need a part of that strategy to be extremely simple, that anyone can act upon simply by following their own instincts. That's called populism. I'd like to see Mark Benner be a voice for populism, because that's the ingredient missing from Udall's conception of universal health care.

Power, Democratic style

An aging, entrenched Democratic leader lost a major battle this week, and it was great news for both the Democratic Party and for Detroit. After 15 years of being told by a Republican Congress that government is the cause of every problem, and hate is the simple answer, the debate in Congress about fuel efficiency standards brings us back to real life.

Republicans largely kept out of the fuel economy debate, because there was nothing there for them. Inaction by government had already been tried, and failed miserably. American car makers, failing to please even their American customers, are losing market share and seem powerless to stop it. There's no one for the Republicans to hate in this debate: they can't hate the Japanese, whose cars they love and whose success they admire; they can't hate labor unions, which have largely disappeared as an economic force; they can't hate incompetent corporate leadership because, well, they're Republicans. I thought they might find a way to blame gay marriage or brown-skinned people, but so far that hasn't stuck.

Earlier this year the Bush Administration made a lame attempt to take a position in the debate by asking for authority to allow auto makers to set their own fuel economy standards, thus prolonging government inaction. Fortunately, it was ignored. It hasn't been heard from since.

With a problem like this, there are no simple answers and no substitute for hard work. There's no purely partisan solution, either. Detroit for decades has relied on Democratic Congressman John Dingell, and others of a protectionist ilk in both parties, to preserve its declining market and help it ignore matters like globalization and climate change. In the Democratic Party the opposite of protectionism is represented by the neo-liberal wing, which you might have expected would be supportive of the Bush laissez-faire approach. But they weren't. What makes the debate complex is that there are more than just those two simple choices.

What Speaker Nancy Pelosi has realized is that government can neither ignore Detroit nor coddle it. The third choice is to reinforce the demand of American consumers for more fuel-efficient cars. Americans want to spend less for energy without having to go to war for it. They want Detroit to start doing its part on climate change. They want American automakers to stop following the Japanese, and start leading again. Detroit might feel comfortable milking the last profit out of a declining SUV market, but Americans say that's not good enough.

So did Detroit lose the battle over fuel economy standards? Listen to General Motors Corp. Chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner:

There are tough, new CAFE standards contained in the energy bill before Congress that pose a significant technical and economic challenge to the industry. But, it's a challenge that GM is prepared to put forth its best effort to meet with an array of engineering, research and development resources. We will continue our aggressive pursuit of advance technologies that will deliver more products with more energy solutions to our customers.

That doesn't sound like a loser to me. It sounds like someone who knows he's been slacking, who needs some "tough love" in the form of a strong government partner to help him, push him, to mend his ways.

Pelosi's action on fuel economy standards is the first hint of the change in direction we've been expecting. A Democratic president and Democratic Congress will neither be lazy nor protectionist. They will be active in asserting the public interest. That's power, Democratic style.