Author: Barbara

Have pity on FBI Director James Comey. Attacked from every side for every possible sin, from horrendous judgement to outrageous bias, his previously unimpeachable reputation will never recover.

But here’s what people don’t get. In today’s world it can be easy for followers to force leaders to do something they would not do otherwise. In this case it seems clear that Comey was caught between the proverbial rock and hard place, his hand forced by some of his underlings to do things he neither wanted nor intended.

Did Comey handle the over-heated politics of this election season with maximum legal and political savvy? He did not. But, was he obliged to act in unaccustomed ways by those who had less formal authority than did he? He was.

During the first presidential debate Hillary Clinton singled her out. “One of the worst things Trump said,” Clinton charged, “was about a woman in a beauty context…. He called this woman ‘Miss Piggy,’ then he called her ‘Miss Housekeeping’ because she was Latina.”

“Donald,” Clinton went on, “she has a name. Her name is Alicia Machado. And she has become a US citizen and you can bet she is going to vote this November!”

Obviously it was Trump who started it all – spewing anti-Latino comments from the earliest days of his presidential campaign. But if he was the one who started this fight, and if Clinton was the one who fanned this flame, it was the Venezuelan-born “beauty queen” who seized this moment. Alicia Machado took the ball and ran with it.

She went public just as soon as that first debate was over. “I lament that I could be an uncomfortable person for Mr. Trump, but that’s how things were,” she insisted, “and I know very well what he’s capable of, this man.” Moreover she never let up. Just a few days ago, in the all-important state of Florida, Machado campaigned by Clinton’s side, rallying her base. “Trump was overwhelming,” she told a pumped up crowd. “I was scared of him. He made fun of me and I didn’t know how to respond.” To her fellow Floridians she shouted in English and Spanish, “To all the Latinos, this is our election. This is our election, Latinos!”

One day before the election is the prediction it will be a breakthrough for the Latino community. If one day after the election the prediction proves prescient, a former Miss Universe, Alicia Machado, will have played a leading part.

To depend on American media is to be persuaded that America, the United States of America, is the only country on the planet. Or, at least, it’s the only country on the planet that matters. So far as American media are concerned, there is no story save one – the 2016 presidential campaign. While this obsession with self is understandable in the weeks immediately preceding the election, it’s inexcusable for months longer, not to speak of years.

Did you know that….

• Since an aborted coup attempt in July, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has accused, fired, or detained more than 100,000 people from the military, police, judiciary, media and academic?!
• Last week China’s Communist Party greatly enhanced the status of China’s president, Xi Jinping, by giving him the coveted and seldom awarded title of “Core Leader”?!
• More than 10,000 people recently took to the streets of central Seoul to protest against South Korea’s president Park Geun-hye, for her curious and possibly corrupt relationship with a woman now accused of embezzlement, and of handling secret documents without clearance?
• UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon fired the commander of the peacekeeping force in South Sudan, who reportedly failed to protect civilians during fighting in Juba, the capital, last July?
• Iraqi special forces are either on the outskirts or just inside ISIS-held Mosul, primed to retake, albeit not before possibly heavy fighting, the jewel in ISIS’s crown?
• French President Francois Hollande has accused Russia – ergo Vladimir Putin – of war crimes?

Just asking. Should any one of these questions raise questions, check out the BBC – the British Broadcasting Company. BBC broadcasts are based on the startling assumption that there are nations in the world other than England.

I am an American – a proud American. Which explains why as I’ve experienced it, the 2016 presidential campaign has turned from comedy to tragedy. What once, I admit, I found somewhat funny, I now find somewhat sad, dispiriting, even frightening.

We know full well that in recent decades Americans’ faith in leaders of all stripes has been in sharp decline. We similarly know that Americans’ faith in their elected officials has led this list. Our political leaders are even less trusted than, for example, our business leaders. Moreover, the span is not narrow but wide. In mid- October only 24 % of Americans had “a fair amount of” of confidence in their political leaders, while fully 46% had a similar level of faith in their military leaders.*

These poll numbers are just two weeks old. Still, it’s safe to assume that now, one week before Election Day, they would be even lower. The last two weeks of the presidential campaign have been that bad – both major party candidates far, far less inspiring and trustworthy than any pair previous.

The tragedy to which I refer is not the campaign per se, but rather the years that will immediately succeed it. Given the muck and mire in which we’ve been stuck in the recent past,  governance will be dauntingly difficult. I shudder to think of President Hillary Clinton trying to get legislation through Congress, trying to broker a deal with Republicans. I shudder even more to think of President Donald Trump trying to govern the country, trying to govern the beloved country sanely, securely, and sensibly.

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*Pew Research Center, October 18, 2016.

In 2009 the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to President Barack Obama. It was questioned at the time, for Obama had been in office only briefly, and had done nothing obvious to garner such an honor. Nevertheless, the Norwegian Nobel Committee stood by its selection – though since then Geir Lundestad, Secretary of the Committee at the time, did admit that “the Committee didn’t achieve what it had hoped for.”

Mild understatement. It is the tragic irony of Obama’s presidency that he has failed miserably to merit the award he was given pathetically prematurely. Instead of leading for peace, Obama has followed for war. To be sure, blame, in particular for the calamity in Syria, extends well beyond the White House. Still, in the unipolar world that Obama was the last to inherit, the US was the obvious candidate, the only candidate, to preclude or at least mitigate the slaughter in Syria.

From a recent editorial in the Financial Times: “At this rate, Russia’s bombardment of Aleppo alongside the Syrian air force will enter the annals of infamy …. Aleppo is the…scene of a war crime matched in scale by few others in recent decades ….”

Of course in the old days, before television cameras and web cams, leaders (and others) could claim that they did not know. That they did not know the horrors of wars unfolding far from home but on their watch. Now effectively no one can make such a claim. Now leaders (and others) know everything or, at least, we know enough. Ergo, the decision to stand by and do nothing while Rome burns is a conscious one, a deliberate one.

In my book, Followership, I wrote that Bystanders observe but they do not participate. They decide consciously, deliberately, to disengage, which makes them, in effect, accomplices. Being a Bystander is, in other words, “a declaration of neutrality, which amounts to tacit support for whoever and whatever constitutes the status quo.”

So far as Syria is concerned, then, Barack Obama, the US, has been the follower and Vladimir Putin, Russia, the leader. Nobel Peace Prize anyone?

Years ago, during the scandal globally known by the name of one of its protagonists, Monica Lewinsky, I labeled Hillary Clinton an enabler. Whatever the precise nature of Bill Clinton’s long history of sexual entanglements outside marriage, it was clear his wife had long put up with his escapades, obviously deciding to remain married to this man, notwithstanding his bad behavior and her resultant, public, sequential humiliations.

Yes, Hillary was, and turns out still is, Bill’s enabler.

Seems little he won’t do to increase the chances that he will in some way profit while she will in some way suffer.  Whatever WikiLeaks has yet to reveal, it’s clear even now that he, as head of the Clinton Foundation, was guilty of being greedy in the extreme, while she was serving as secretary of state and preparing to run for the nation’s highest office. She, meanwhile, was a Bystander, aware of what he did and how and why, but leaving it to others to try to tamp down her venal husband.

So far as we know, there was no point at which Hillary Clinton put her foot down. So far as we know, there was no point at which Hillary Clinton demanded of Bill Clinton that he stop his egregious quest for personal enrichment. And, so far as we know, there was no point at which Hillary Clinton asserted her independence from Bill Clinton to her own personal, not to speak of political advantage. It was left curiously, typically, to daughter Chelsea to try to bridge the gap between her parents, to intercede episodically and fruitlessly on her mother’s behalf, to try to restrain and contain her father.

Who am I to judge another couple – another marriage? This though is not about live and let live. The fact is from the Clintons’ private behaviors emerge public consequences. Which makes their psychodrama my problem – not only theirs.

Not for nothing is George Washington known as “the father of his country.” The honorific is for his leadership roles during the Revolutionary War, the Constitutional Convention, and his two terms in the White House. But mostly he is thought of as the nation’s “father” because he did what effective leaders do – they parent their followers. Effective leaders provide their followers with a sense of comfort and control, even if sometimes this sense is misplaced.

The leader’s parenting role came to mind yesterday, while reading an article about how many Americans have been made anxious by the 2016 presidential campaign. The American Psychological Association reports that 52 % of adults are coping with high levels of stress brought on by the political season. According to an article in yesterday’s New York Times, “therapists around the country have said in interviews that patients are coming to appointments citing their fears, anger and anxiety about the election.”*

While the article claimed that the reason for our stress is related to the issues –  issues such as terrorism, gun rights, and sexual assault play into our fears and anxieties – the leadership literature suggests that the problem goes deeper. It suggests that what we really seek is a recreation of, a reiteration of, a reincarnation of Mommy and Daddy.

We long for reassuring authority figures to play parental roles: to satisfy our need for personal safety; to satisfy our need for domestic security; to satisfy our need for protection against interloper outsiders; to satisfy our need to be well taken care of; to satisfy our need to be included in a group; and to satisfy our need to feel special. Leaders who appear able to satisfy these needs meet with our approval. Leaders who do not face our disapproval.

So the reasons for our collective stress have less to do with specific policy issues than with how we feel about Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Instead of calming us down, enclosing us in a protective embrace, they do the opposite. They trigger in us feelings of fear, anger, distrust and frustration.**

But, as the campaign winds down, it’s increasingly seeming we prefer having Hillary as Mommy than Donald as Daddy.  Her whopping 20 something point lead on the matter of temperament is why her as parent is preferred over her volatile Republican counterpart.

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*http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/20/well/mind/talking-to-your-therapist-about-election-anxiety.html

**http://www.people-press.org/2016/06/22/6-how-do-the-political-parties-make-you-feel/

What happened to the Tea Party? Where did it go? Why did it all but vanish? How did it come to pass that the party, the movement, that until five minutes ago was central to the conversation about politics in America has been wiped from the nation’s consciousness?

During President Obama’s first term and into his second, the Tea Party was the proverbial bull in the china shop: a highly energetic, highly disruptive, and highly potent political force that no one was able to tame. Consisting generally of right wing Republicans, the Tea Party was the first twenty-first century faction that was genuinely divisive. Tea Partiers caused an early and significant fissure in one of America’s two major political parties, proving impossible for mainstream Republicans effectively to control.

John Boehner, who became Speaker of the House in 2011, had the miserable experience of discovering that Tea Partiers, ostensibly his fellow Republicans, were impossible to lead. Instead, to his astonishment, he found himself dealing with a band of grassroots, anti-authority populists who shared nothing so much as a deep distrust of the American establishment.

Sound familiar? Turns out the Tea Party had a baby. The baby’s name is Donald. In other words, the Tea Party has by no means vanished. Rather it has a new face – the face of Donald Trump. Trump’s most fervent followers share many of the same characteristics and demographics that six or eight years ago typified Tea Partiers.

Tea Partiers were, famously, leaderless. Now they are not.

Robert Mugabe has insisted on staying president of Zimbabwe for almost 30 years. Bashir al-Assad is dead set on holding on to power in Syria, despite having wreaked death and destruction on his country and its people. Vladimir Putin has been either president or prime minister of Russia since 2000, and shows no signs of going anywhere far into the future. Recep Tayyip Erdogan has already been either president or prime minister of Turkey since 2003, but gives every intention of plowing on with his plan to consolidate and strengthen his powers still further. And while China’s president Xi Jinping has been in office only since 2012, by every measure he has strengthened his hand since then, eliminating or muting much of his opposition, and suggesting he wants more of what he has for more, many more, years to come.

Seems power is intoxicating. Addictive. Habit forming. Hungry making.

Churchill, predictably, put it perfectly. Speaking about Hitler before the House of Commons in 1938, he remarked, “The might behind the German Dictator increases daily. His appetite may grow with eating.”

Trump has been attacked for his attacks on whoever is the other. For criminalizing the Clintons, for demeaning and debasing women, for slandering Mexicans, for excluding Muslims, for mocking Americans including war heroes and the disabled… I could go on. No need to though, for the full freight of his fury is easy to see, for example in the raging speech he delivered yesterday, in Florida.

But the frightening thing about Trump’s rhetoric is less what it reveals about what he thinks of others, than what it reveals about what he thinks of himself. He is a full-fledged, all-out, no-holds-barred messianic megalomaniac.

Yesterday’s speech smacked of nothing so much as Trump as savior – Trump promising members of his “movement” to deliver them from danger. “I take all these slings and arrows for you,” he shouted.  “I take them for our movement so we can have our country back.” Only he can do this he insisted, play the part of martyr, to redeem us, to save us from ourselves and from the evils in the ether.

At one point he went so far as to invoke heaven and hell. “Many of my friends and many political experts warned me,” he intoned, “that this campaign would be a journey to hell. But they’re wrong. It will be a journey to heaven, because we will help so many people that are so desperately in need of help.”

“A journey to heaven.” When was the last time a prominent American politician told you that he and he alone could take you on a stairway to heaven?

Be forewarned. History tells us that were this man ever to reach the levers of power he would be nothing other than a delusional dictator.