One Perspective

 Leadership? The best schools don’t teach it

Stephen B. Young, The Daily Record Newswire

Last week’s New Yorker ran a long article on President Obama by David Remnick. After reading the first several paragraphs I assumed I was participating in a publicity build-up to a celebrity event launch — something akin to the Grammys or the Oscars. The article, I thought, was timed to prepare an influential segment of the public mind for the president’s State of the Union address this past Tuesday.

But after reading on, Remnick came across to me as a writer conflicted. He was caught between two plausible assessments of Barack Obama as our president—one centered on disappointment and another on lingering hope.

The disappointment would arise from the realization that Barack Obama, for all his intelligence and verbal facility, is not a leader. The hope is that his intelligence is really a kind of wisdom that has guided him well in decision-making and thus will cement his achievement as having been an effective steward of his office in his time.

What came through to me from Remnick’s reporting of his conversations with the president during a West Coast fund-raising tour and from his close-up observations of the president in action in and around those events is that Barack Obama is disengaged. It is as if he is not really present actively, but only reflectively — like a thoughtful, clever dinner guest who does not want to upstage the host and hostess.

Obama, Remnick informs us, instinctively puts his mind in the middle of considerations, arguments and possibilities — seemingly keeping his options open.

Remnick concludes at one point: “This is the archetypal Obama habit of mind and politics, the calm, professional, immersion in complexity played out in front of ardent supporters who crave a rallying cry.”

The intellectual gifts and the abiding air of disengagement support both Remnick’s suspicion of disappointment and his hope for better outcomes yet to be realized in retrospect.

The persona of our president, as it manifests in Remnick’s essay, aligns with what Harvard Law School does best — which is to teach a kind of facile intellectual distancing from emotions and realities. Legal reasoning in this vein rewards looking at all sides of an issue and making many distinctions — some of which turn on technical minutiae — but has little to do with making decisions or affirming core values.

Barack Obama’s most successful work came as a student at the Harvard Law School and as president of its student-run law review. He excelled in the formalisms of legal analysis, which never required him to commit one way or the other. He played to what others wanted to hear in the moment.

These days the Harvard Law School excels in teaching a kind of performance art. The accomplished student or graduate performs mental exercises to impress audiences.  There is a theatrical aspect to being a lawyer that involves role-playing: as expert or counselor, confidant, advocate, even attack dog when necessary. But all this usually occurs in the context of being a hireling rather than a principal with one’s own values at stake.

The old joke about lawyers is relevant: How much is 2 + 2? Answer: How much do you want it to be?

Barack Obama found that he could perform very well at Harvard Law. His skill took him to the United States Senate and then to the presidency, permitting him to best Hillary Clinton in mobilizing support when Hillary is no mean performer herself.

Hillary’s noted performances were to affirm that: ”You know, I’m not sitting here — some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette” and more recently her demand before the Congress to know what relevance her decisions about Benghazi and the death of Ambassador Christopher Stevens had now that the events were over and done with.

Bill Clinton’s performance skills are also quite notable. Both Bill and Hillary are Yale law school graduates.

But as in most forms of contemporary performance art, the ego and emotions of the performer are very much at center stage. The performance is to entertain others by acting out one’s flair for rhetoric and coolness and thereby to validate their own ambitions or anxieties.

Remnick relates how Barack Obama is more comfortable performing before significant audiences than mixing and mingling. In the small setting, he is more under the judgmental microscope of others with less control over their perceptions of him and more likely to be only their equal in dedication and resolve.

Obama’s reluctance to get up-close and personal with power players in the House and Senate — either to impose his will or work out a deal — has become Washington folk wisdom.

The function of the new-model Harvard Law School attended by Barack Obama is not the socialization of true leaders. It is to certify qualification for membership in our new ruling elite.

Obama’s formation at the Harvard Law School explains to me (who also attended and then returned as an assistant dean) why Obama has shown such diffidence as an executive manager. He did not personally manage the drafting of the Affordable Care Act, nor its implementation. He did not personally manage the drafting of the Dodd-Frank legislation to restore the constructive reliability of our financial system. Former Secretary of State Robert Gates, in his autobiography, describes an Obama who does not feel comfortable taking charge of wars on behalf of his country.

Very similar to the Nixon White House, the Obama presidency centers on a small coterie of loyalists and is run day to day not from the great departments of government, but by the White House staff.

Remnick noted — with some concern and disdain, I thought — the surrounding of Obama by young staff sycophants who are, above everything else, caught up in their proximity to the highest rungs of our meritocracy but totally unfit for decision-making under pressure. Remnick was not witnessing the kind of setting that marks a determined, tough-minded leader who makes the tough calls because he has a vision of what should be.

Remnick’s portrayal of President Obama up close is a case study in the rise of a new leadership class in America. The theory of such a change in elite composition was recently provided by Jason Epstein in the Wall Street Journal. Epstein traces the decline of the old WASP elite and its replacement by a meritocracy recruited and trained by institutions of higher education.

Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, paralleled by Al Gore and Mitt Romney, are all members of the new meritocracy, all products of Harvard and Yale.

Oddly, George W. Bush can be counted both as a WASP and as a product of the meritocracy.

The social function of the meritocracy is to satisfy the personality drives of its members, which are usually some combination of wealth, power, and celebrity coupled with irresponsibility. The unintended consequences of building this new social elite has been to bring about the “Kardashianization” of America. And Harvard Law School has been at the heart of the process.

The meritocracy we have built recruits narcissists, then rewards and promotes them under the “best and the brightest” syndrome of superior individual performance.

But climbing up the rungs of the higher education gateway is demanding. There is a price to be paid in the form of compulsive over-achievement in hitting targets designed to weed out the merely nice and well-intentioned from the narcissists who want everything in life to revolve around them. Consider the socio-pathology ascribed by many to Bill and Hillary Clinton.

The meritocracy has no higher ends to serve than that. Its conscience is only a superficial secular humanism that rests on a mostly self-centered concept of human dignity. The legitimation of its ideals is for the world to respect my dignity as I define it and not so much for me to defer to others who disagree with me.

There is a problem here, an internal contradiction, with respect to who should defer to whom: me to you or you to me?

President Obama told David Remnick: “I’m not a particularly ideological person. There’s things, some values I feel passionately about,” including making sure that everybody is “being treated with dignity or respect regardless of what they look like or what their last name is or who they love.”

St Paul’s F. Scott Fitzgerald, a Princeton graduate, predicted all this self-absorption in his 1922 novel “The Great Gatsby,” in which the narrator describes Tom and Daisy Buchanan as “careless people … they smashed up things and creatures … and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

Any echoes here of pre-2008 Wall Street or the other masters of the universe who imposed willy-nilly the Affordable Care Act?

Those Wall Street experts and managers, by the way, had also graduated mainly from our best business schools and had for their own profit and pleasure manipulated the risk and pricing algorithms certified by the best minds at those schools.

As the writer Sarah Churchwell notes in her book “Careless People,” “The Great Gatsby” foresaw a world marked indelibly by “recklessness and greed, waste and profligacy, trial by newspaper and manipulative media moguls, irresponsible bankers and bad investments, cronyism and corruption, media scandals and Ponzi schemes, invented celebrities and frauds, violence and cynicism, epidemic materialism and a frantic search for  values we keep losing.”

And where in all this will we find leaders?