The Leader We Deserve

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The effort required to address our current crisis is trivial compared with Britain repelling the Nazis. But the situation is getting more dire. Remember all the talk about how we have been "borrowing from future generations" with the federal deficit, consumer debt and so on? Well, it's been going on for more than a generation, and the future is now. There have been so many false alarms that maybe we can be forgiven for thinking this is another one. But no one is going to forgive those IOUS.

A second desirable quality of leadership, especially now, is toxic even to mention for its allegedly élitist overtones: intelligence. Not necessarily anything as crude as raw IQ scores, though something closer to that than to the kind of mystical wisdom attributed to Ronald Reagan. Call it intellectual curiosity, perhaps, or a willingness to engage with complicated ideas. This financial crisis is extremely complicated. Surely the best and the brightest can screw up, as they famously did in Vietnam. But four decades later (and after eight years of George W. Bush), maybe we can agree that on balance it would be a plus to have a President who is smart. Maybe even really, really smart.

For example, I do not understand how this $700 billion bailout we have all agreed to is supposed to work. Do you? Does Tom Brokaw? Do Obama and McCain? I suspect that one of them does and the other doesn't. But I don't know. I can't help thinking it would be nice to have a President who understands it. That's the kind of leader we want: one who could get us back to business as usual.