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On Our Next Leader: Seven Characteristics for Our President

On Our Next Leader: Seven Characteristics for Our President

Last updated on: April 9, 2015 at 12:36 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

On Our Next Leader: Seven Characteristics for Our President 2015-04-09T12:36:56-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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2016 will come as certainly as the sun rising and having a Presidential election in the United States of America is more certain than the Cubs failing to win the World Series in 2016. One is highly likely, the other is possible, but not likely at all. This is very good news because in most places at most times free elections where people have a say in choosing the head of government have been as rare as Cub’s championships in the last one hundred years.

The United States is not perfect, but we will have a more or less free and more or less fair election in 2016.

Short of an apocalypse, Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee. Stranger things have happened than Joe Biden winning the Democratic nomination, Franklin Pierce was President, but Jimmy Carter may have used up all available strange for another century with the Peanut Farmer’s successful bid for the White House. Clinton runs with the charm of Richard Nixon and the natural political talent of Al Gore, but she has the proper last name and the time is right for a woman in the White House. Is that enough to get a gosh-awful-debater through?

The GOP field will soon be full of politicians aware that it is very hard for a popular President to put his successor in office. Washington did it. Jackson did it. Reagan did it. Obama? We will see. Clinton was not Obama’s vice-president but she overshadowed Biden. Is the nation ready for three Democratic terms?

The time for picking a Clinton or a GOP-candidate-to-be-named-later has not yet come for voters. We have a moment to ask: “What should traditional Christians want in the leader of the Republic?”

A candidate should have strong character and virtue: public and private.

We must have a candidate who tells us the truth and lives a public life that is beyond reproach. Because the private stayed private, we used to have a margin for the hypocrite who did not force us to watch his decadence. This was always dangerous given the potential for blackmail (looking your way John F. Kennedy) but now is fatal.

What the President does in private will be public and half the nation will pretend it is good to save him. We are not looking for a pastor in the White House or a saint, though God knows we would take a saint if one ran. Since none is running, we will take a person that is decent, honest, faithful, and just.

Harry Truman and Reagan both were decent (if imperfect) chaps so it is possible. I would take a pious and practical Christian leader like James Garfield, but this is not necessary. The Republic needs any man or woman who can take the oath of office and mean every word. The state of the soul of the President is God’s business and not the citizen’s.

A candidate should have leadership experience.

The White House is a bad place to learn to run something big. This should be obvious, but legislative talent does not translate to executive talent. Gerald Ford was a decent man and a fine legislator, but he never had an executive temperament.

Being an executive is different from being a “free agent” and generally successful Presidents have led large ventures before talking office. Eisenhower led D-Day. Abraham Lincoln is the exception, but then we are unlikely to do well electing most people with one year of formal education because that too is like Lincoln.

Lincoln is abnormally great. Just as the Nazi Party is so evil as to be comparable to nothing, so any candidate or supporter should avoid (almost at all costs) comparing his or her candidate to Lincoln.

A candidate should be willing to listen, delegate, and change her/his mind.

An ideologue is death in a Republic. Reagan had a clear and consistent idea about the world, but was willing to learn, evolve, and compromise to move the discussion in the right direction. He changed methods and means, but kept his overall conservative ideas intact. He saw that Gorbachev represented a new direction in the Soviet Union, but Reagan did not lose his grip on reality, either.

A good leader also delegates and does not think he is the smartest guy in the room. Nothing is more dangerous than a narcissistic person like Woodrow Wilson in office.

Isn’t this vague? How can we know a good leader? Here is a practical tip: Look at a leader and see if he has kept the same inner circle and staff. High turnover is a sign that you should not turn over the nuclear code to a person unstable enough to pick or keep talent. Remember: if a person has three or four spouses, either they are bad at picking or just bad or both.

We need a leader, not an unstable tyrant in the White House.

A candidate should have a thought out political worldview.

Times change, but we need to know the candidate’s instincts. I do not trust “big” in a Republic. I am looking for a person whose instinct is to worry about abuse of power . . . including abuse of power by the candidate’s party! And yet avoid the candidate who has an answer to every question and will not deviate regardless of changing circumstances, harm caused, or people hurt.

How can we tell?

An ideologue attacks at every turn, breaths fire, is never thoughtful. A wishy-washy person cannot articulate a basic vision of the Republic and governance. If a candidate cannot wax eloquent on their political philosophy, the candidate is running for power and not principle. If a worldview sounds canned or overheated, suspect an ideologue or fakery.

Look for a person who has put a decade or more in the trenches fighting the good fights even at personal cost. Look for someone that even his opponents respect in private.

A candidate should have a vision with conservative instincts.

Without a vision the people, people perish. It is not 1980 and Reaganism is not more right in detail for today than FDR and the New Deal is sound policy for the Democrats. We need candidates who take their general worldview and apply it to the world as it is. How should we deal with Iran? What is the plan for an aging infrastructure? Can’t you balance the budget in your time in office (as Clinton and the GOP Congress did)?

A candidate should seek justice for the poor and wish to defend the weak.

Christians care for the poor and love justice. Candidates should know that Walter Scott is not just a novelist in today’s politics. This is not just good politics, though it is. Mitt Romney, a great and decent man, could not articulate a plan and this was a major reason he lost states like Ohio.

The solutions need not be bigger government, but we need a discussion of what the two-thirds of America not up to college are going to do. We need to discuss why college is becoming too expensive. We need to discuss whether libertarian approaches to entertainment have been good for the poor. We need to discuss ways to bring equal justice to the African-American community that too often faces police abuse.

I am a Republican and a conservative and I think Republican and conservative ideas are best for the poor and the weak. However, it is not enough for a candidate to say this once. The GOP needs a candidate who can explain and debate why his or her ideas will help the poor, the disadvantaged, and spread justice. If the candidate has no ideas how his ideas about small government and a better justice department can help, this candidate has no business running. One job of any government is to make sure that justice is equal for all. How will the candidate make things better?

(I am not foreclosing the idea that doing less at the government level might do more for the poor at the personal level. If this is so, then the candidate needs to argue for it using data and debate it with critics. The candidate must not stick to ideological generalities. A candidate isn’t running for professor of America, but we need him to be able to educate the nation not demagogue it.)

Of course, we need justice for those that can be legally murdered in the United States: unborn children.

A candidate should be humble.

Confidence is required to run for President of the United States, but humility is necessary to survive the job. If a man does not start with humility, on-the-job training will age him quickly and the Republic cannot afford the psychic difficulties. George HW Bush was a humble man and whatever the merits of his time in office, this trait helped him and us negotiate one of the greatest triumphs of the Republic: the end of the Cold War. He did all he could to share the credit, perhaps to his political detriment, and gave the nations of all the old Soviet Empire the best start at liberty he could.

As for us, the voters, we must not let the perfect candidate (the Lincoln of our imaginations) be the enemy of the good man or woman who runs. Nobody will have all these traits. All the women and men running will have faults. I pray we avoid the intellectualism and arrogance of a Woodrow Wilson, the mania and genocidal rage of an Andy Jackson, the dithering of a James Buchanan, the corruption of a Lyndon Johnson, or the tragedy of a great promise cut off by an assassin as with James Garfield.

Who do I think is best just now?

Abraham Lincoln is best, but he is not running having more splendid things to do.

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