True Leaders Don't Yearn to Be Liked and Accepted
And: ch ch ch ch changes on the way
My apologies for how long it’s been since you’ve heard from me. You may notice that even though Listen. Lead. Unite. does appear in some places on our site, our newsletter has been renamed Perfect Our Union. I’m in the process of changing our organization’s name, with a revised mission statement:
To heal America’s political traumatization and continue the perfection of our Union by building diverse pro-democracy alliances, and telling original, inspiring and challenging stories about our history and national mythologies.
Why did I make this change? Our new mission statement and organization name, I concluded, more accurately reflect the kind of work I believe is necessary to achieving our goals. Though our nation’s history is complicated—especially our founding—the pursuit of perfecting our Union was forward-facing; it has endured as an aspirational mythology, inextricably linking the expansion and advancement of rights and freedoms to We the People. And I will always emphasize the importance of listening, leading and uniting.
In addition to our organization’s changes, I’ve started on a manuscript for a new book, with a working title of: Obama and Trump: What Polar Opposite Presidents Teach Us About Leadership; and am getting close to completing my first draft of a drama/comedy screenplay that has nothing to do with politics (which is probably why I enjoy so much writing it!).
OK, enough boring bio bits. Thank you to The New Republic for publishing my latest: a compare and contrast between Nancy Pelosi and Kevin McCarthy, entitled: House Republicans Are Going to Wish They Had a Nancy Pelosi. As always, thanks for your support!
Rich
“I would say that one of the things that encouraged me so much when I became elected to the leadership was the letters I received from fathers of daughters, saying that, 'My daughter can now do many more things because of what you did.’”
—Nancy Pelosi
Kevin McCarthy, and his obsessive need to be liked and accepted.
If we have to ask, “who's in charge?,” no one's in charge.
I taught that to my six-year-old when she was five. Last month’s Speaker election exposed just how many adult-aged children hold some of the levers of federal power.
Why does “my Kevin” McCarthy even want to be Speaker of the House? This question, as best I can tell, has largely been overlooked. The Speaker position itself, and all its accompanying responsibilities, are not what McCarthy actually want; as Saul Alinsky once wrote: the issue is never the issue.
McCarthy has spent his entire career obsessively yearning to be liked and accepted, simultaneously standing for nothing, and standing for everything. When one's moral compass solely points in the direction of being liked and accepted, that is a most-dangerous trait, befitting no one worthy of any position of leadership, power and/or lawmaking. McCarthy wants the Speaker gavel because he sees it as the affirmation he's sought his entire professional life: the pinnacle of being liked and accepted.
With Trump the sole exception, McCarthy has a compelling case for most spectacularly-failed GOP leader since Nixon; I would not hire McCarthy to sell parachutes to skydivers, because skydivers would rather take their chances from 10,000-feet than purchase from McCarthy a parachute.
Never in our history have there been successive Speakers of the House as starkly contrasting as Nancy Pelosi and McCarthy.
Admittedly, it is difficult to muster sympathy for McCarthy; maybe it's my Catholic upbringing that sullenly forces me to view him as a pathetically tragic figure—an anthropomorphic sum total of a Faustian bargainer.
True, honest and effective leaders don't worry themselves with being liked and accepted. In fairness (and, unfortunately), McCarthy's insatiable need to be liked and accepted isn't unique within the GOP's caste; the same applies to Trump, Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, Elise Stefanik and the political right’s latest groupthink pundit, Elon Musk, amongst others.
Let's compare and contrast McCarthy with Pelosi, who never sought to be liked and accepted. First elected to the U.S. House in 1987, she intuitively understood that chameleon-ism in the male-dominated business of politics would render her easy prey not only for right-wingers, but some antiquity-minded “make America great again” Reagan Democrats (some of whom became President Clinton Reagan Democrats). If you want results, earned respect, consistency and occasional administrative shows of force—all of which Pelosi has masterfully juggled—trump being liked and accepted.
Being a woman explains some of the decades-long GOP sexist ire directed her way. It runs deeper than that, though: the GOP scorns Pelosi because the esteem others hold her in is genuine; GOP politicians—and, most especially, McCarthy—aren't even respected by most of their own voters. If McCarthy retired tomorrow, nary a human being would lament: “oh, I so miss Kevin.” Is that harsh of me to say? Perhaps, but it's also wholly accurate.
Pelosi is the G.O.A.T. of Speakers, and everyone knows it, including, especially, the GOP. She is probably the most qualified member of Congress—House or Senate—never to run for President. When I was a member of the politically traumatized GOP/Trump/DeSantis claque, even some of the politically traumatized/Robert E. Lee-worshiping/machine-gun owning/Ivy League-educated Republicans I often congregated with begrudgingly acknowledged that they wished the Republican Party had a Pelosi.
Though not his fault, Obama politically traumatized Republicans more than any post-World War 2 Democrat. Second-most politically traumatizing Democrat may be Pelosi; it’s close between she and Hillary Clinton. No one wonders to whom Republicans are referring, replete with bulging neck veins, when citing the names “Nancy” and “Hillary.”
The reason no one is really in charge at the GOP is because there is not a “who” in charge, but “whats”—namely, the GOP's gays/sex/marriage/male/Caucasian/Christian theocracy/Obama/racial animus/COVID hysterical, paranoid and politically traumatizing mythologies, which I deconstructed in detail here.
Never has one had to ask if Pelosi was in charge.
Most Republican candidates, nationwide, must be liked and accepted by the basest voters amongst us: this is why McCarthy says, straight-faced, that the Jan. 6 insurrection was "legitimate political discourse,” even though he knows full damn well that some of his colleagues could have been murdered that day, and that Trump bears some responsibility for inciting the mob; and why Trump, DeSantis, et al. cautiously ballet-dance rhetorically so as not to alienate neo-Nazis, white supremacists and COVID deniers who think the vaccine, if it doesn't kill us first, will turn us into cyclopes. Eventually, the monster comes for its creator; McCarthy is a creator who sought to be liked and accepted by his monster. Yes, there are also politically traumatized Democrats; I know this because quite-a-many have contacted me over the last many months. Most Democrat candidates, however, unlike their Republican counterparts, don’t need politically traumatized voters to win elections.
McCarthy, and the embarrassing Speaker election, are microcosms of the GOP's terminal illness (I painstakingly detailed here why the party is terminally ill). Those who opposed McCarthy—and will continue to do so—are getting head starts on the inevitable realignment, and further splintering, of the party of Lincoln (he who wouldn't win a singular Republican primary today; and, in a future article, I will delve into the inevitable realignments of both the Democratic, and Republican, parties). Only the American people, though, can mercy-kill the GOP.