Does Obama Have the Emotional Intelligence to Do the Job

From Wasington Post, On Leadership article by John R. Ryan, entitled "Raw Ability."

I'm very optimistic about Barack Obama's presidency. He has the raw ability - the first-rate intellect, strong emotional intelligence, confidence and good judgment - to be a truly great president, one who comes into office with serious potential and lives up to it by continuing to grow.

It remains to be seen.

I'm reminded of Daniel Goleman's comment in "Emotional Intelligence," that the hardest challenge in childhood, the biggest test of the child's emotional intelligence, is "breaking into a new, already-formed playgroup."

As we speak, Obama is busily reshaping his new play group. Kicking some out he doesn't like, bringing in some he does. In this and other decisions, he will begin to disappoint, renege on promises, and shift his position on certain issues, because in order to get something accomplished, he needs to build a bigger support base.

Now lets consider his judgment in choosing schooling for the girls, played up by the media (as Ryan says) as a major transitional challenge. Would it be Sidwell Friends or Georgetown Day?

or public school?

A sop is thrown to us in The Huffington Post: "Michelle Obama went to public schools on Chicago's South Side, and understands the importance of strong public schools, Lelyveld said, and the administration plans to work hard on that."

Somehow I'm not impressed.

Well the Obama dilemma is somewhat different from the family I know where they, too, have an important "transitional decision" to make. The father was recently diagnosed with cancer, and they must decide whether the father gets the mri for his tumor once every 3 mos. as recommended, or once every 6 mos., which would enable them to keep their children out of the wretched local public school system and in ttheir private school. Since of course, as we all know, insurance doesn't cover "diagnostic tests." ("and the administration plans to work hard on that"?)

An example of the wretched public education in this family's town, which I recently visited? I stood at the checkout line at the WalGreens, which was right in front of the entrance doors on a night when it was 20 degrees, shivered as it opened and closed, and said to the adolescent checkout clerk, "You must be freezing."

Her reply: "No. It depends on the day. Like tomorrow it might be hot."

Another example of the current state of our public education.

Went to an information site to look up the meaning of the word "Hallelujah." We went quickly from the obligatory Greek/Latin thing, and a quick look at Catholicism where, it said, Alleluia was the preferred spelling, to a discussion of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah." Then Bon Jovi's. Then Lang's. I kept reading, becoming more and more curious as to when they would say it. IT. Curiosity turned to incredulity.

They never did.

A comment from a site visitor said, with great restraint, "And while you're at it, you might mention The Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's Messiah. If you know what that is."

Well, Mr. Obama is now ousting the old playground crowd and forming his own, new play group. We observe with interest.

And like Mr. Ryan I sure hope the Sidwell Friends and the rest of life at the White House don't move him too much out of reality. Emails circulate as to whether he's "really" Black, and other nonsense. On the streets, the questions are more practical, and more pertinent:

• where to find affordable housing;
• how to get a job
• how to get a second job
• how to cut back when you're already at the line;
• how to pay for gas to get to a job if you're lucky enough to have one;
• which to sacrifice, medical care or heat;
• whether to pay for jackets or meat;
• what to do when you're 70 and you just lost 3/4s of your IRA; and,
• where to put your mother-in-law who isn't moving in because it would be helpful and also kitchy to be on the D. C. scene, and have an entire suite to herself avec staff, but is moving in because she is destitute, and you need her social security money, so you'll make room for one more person in your highly-mortgaged 2 BR 2 bath house (maybe on of the teenagers can use the LR for a bedroom?), and pray they don't cut her social security payments.

Did Obama use good judgment in placing the girls in private school?

Oh come on. You knew he would. Wouldn't you if you had the choice?

The important thing to keep in mind is 99% of the people in the U. S. do not have that choice.

Web 2.0 Politics and Obama

Tories and Obama embrace web 2.0 while Labour lags behind
an article written by Charlotte Leslie who is the Conservatives' parliamentary candidate for Bristol North West, posted today, Nov. 17.


Says Ms. Leslie:

Gordon Brown's statistical virtual worlds are not the only virtual world in politics....There is another – which New Labour interestingly seems less at home in.

That is the virtual world of web 2.0 – brought to political life recently by the web-world-wizard, the BlackBerrying star with his own social networking website, Barack Obama. And it is completely changing the way politics – and candidates like me – work.

As a candidate in the web-2.0 age, I am instantly connectable to friends and many potential voters. That means people demand very different things from their politicians. They want to know them in ways that were not possible before – they want to know them with their emotional intelligence as well as analyse what they say with their rational faculties.

President, Leadership, Emotional Intelligence

President Barack Obama will soon begin a process that is part of leadership -- disappointing people. Because the constituency is deeply divided, and because he needs more support to push his legislation through, he will have to win over some of those who voted against him (build a broader political base) and in so-doing, will lose some of those who voted for him.

And because he now has to 'put feet' to his idealistic promises he will do the same - disappoint many.

What will he do and how will he do it?

Or course I'm concerned about the election. Who isn't. Whichever way you voted we have some monumnetal work to be done.

So I've been reading.

I went back to LBJ, who pushed some major US-changing legislation through - to say the least. Many reading this blog may not have lived through "integration" or have an inkling what it meant at the time. I remember my husband and I pondering a trip from N. C. to Florida, and being afraid to drive that route at the time.

At any rate, about leadership, from an article on LBJ:

He was fond of quoting Sam Rayburn as saying that ''A man who can't size up another person when he walks in the room had better be in another profession.'' No one could do that better than Johnson. His greatest gifts of leadership - the ability to understand, persuade and subdue - depended on connections and relationships that existed on a human scale.

The part we seem to forget, in our negotiations, is the "subdue" part. Big emotional intelligence thing there. It could be re-phrased as the flip side of "don't leave them wounded."

To continue:

''I always believed,'' he once said, ''that as long as I could take someone into a room with me I could make him my friend. And that included anybody, even Nikita Khrushchev. From the start of my Presidency, I believed that if I handled him right he would go along with me. Deep down, hidden way below, he too wanted what was good, but every now and then this terrible urge for world domination would get into him and take control and then he'd go off on some crazy jag, like putting those missiles in Cuba. I saw all that in him and knew I could cope with it so long as he and I were in the same room.''

Later, as the enigmatic Ho Chi Minh loosed forces that threatened to destroy him, he would remark: ''If only I could get Ho in a room with me, I'm sure we could work things out.''

And then:

It was true that there were few who could totally resist the influence of Lyndon Johnson's personal presence.

''I can't stand the bastard,'' Robert Kennedy once told me after a private meeting with the President, ''but he's the most formidable human being I've ever met.''

From Dick Goodwin's President Lyndon Johnson: The War Within .

What will happen now is we will see if he can be a leader as well as someone who can win an election.

May God bless him in his endeavors, and the U. S. as well.