Picking our Next President

It’s not too early to start thinking about our next president. That kind of thinking will have three salubrious effects. First, it will get us looking at something positive, for a change. Second, it will force us to figure out what’s right about our country and how to build on that. Finally, it might make us consider what makes a good leader, as distinguished from one who can win elections by any and all means necessary, including lying, deceiving voters, and bending or breaking our Constitution.

A recent article in The Atlantic, in my view, sprinted off in the wrong direction. It delved minutely into a potential candidate’s family and family history. It spent a lot of ink analyzing his upbringing, education and political career under the microscope of “eliteness.” After reading it carefully, I couldn’t tell whether the article was a weak kudo, a subtle hatchet job, or a cruel joke.

I’m not linking it because I think it epitomizes how not to pick a president. But the article got me thinking. Do we really want a president “just like us”? What does that even mean, in the most self-consciously diverse nation on the planet? Don’t we want a president who’s better than most of us? who’s smarter, more knowledgeable, calmer, kinder, shrewder and (above all) a better and more thoughtful leader?

I sure do. I want someone who’s “elite,” not in the sense of being born with a silver spoon, but in the sense of having qualities and yes, maybe even connections, that make for smarter and more effective social problem solving. Do we really want to exalt Gavin Newsom’s 960 (total) SAT scores?

I feel sorry, deeply sorry, for young people who came of age around the time Trump rode that famous escalator with Milania down to his first candidacy. A better visual metaphor for our collective descent into Dantean Hell would be hard to find.

How can our youth even know what a good leader is when all they know of Obama, MLK, JFK, Eisenhower, and LBJ they see through the twisted lens of social media? when FDR appears as far back in the fog as Jesus? when everything they see is distorted through lenses of lies and hate? when even our legacy media have made “if it bleeds, it leads” not just a business tip, but a religion?

So I thought I’d spend a little digital ink considering what makes a good president. What’s the essence of good leadership? What qualities in our next president could help us turn our social, political and economic decline around?

First and foremost is intelligence. You can’t even see problems, let alone solve them, unless you’re smart. “Smarts” is the single most underrated quality in a leader. Our failure to recognize it—perhaps even to test it in candidates for high office, even before the primaries—is one of the greatest failings of our democracy.

As we’ve known for about a generation and a half, there are two types of intelligence. The first or “standard” kind is “smarts,” i.e., quick uptake and accurate analysis. We all know it when we see it, as every honest person knows and recognizes someone else as smarter. I call this “analytical intelligence.”

The second kind is emotional intelligence. In 1995, a psychologist and science journalist named Daniel Goleman popularized its concept in his best-selling book, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. The book sold 5 million copies worldwide.

With subsequent advances in science, we now know how the two types of intelligence work. Analytical intelligence uses our cerebral cortex and our “slow” thinking, in ways that produced the great thoughts of Jeremy Bentham, Albert Einstein, John Steward Mill, Sir Isaac Newton and Adam Smith. Emotional intelligence uses our amygdala and “fast thinking,” triggering strong emotions like fear and hate that helped our fittest to survive and thus our species to evolve.

Leaders can use emotional intelligence in two ways. They can evoke and exploit strong emotions in voters. They can rile them up, get them to ignore or suppress their analytical intelligence, and have them march like lemmings to unnecessary battles, or right over a cliff. Or they can quell strong emotions: they can calm people down and appeal to their analytical intelligence to enlist them in rational problem solving.

It takes no analytical genius to see what kind of intelligence our current leader has. He has gone to great lengths, including legal blackmail, to make sure that his grades and standardized test scores from his college days never see the light of day. Those things measure analytical intelligence. His appalling but very real success in getting a big part of our population to share his fear and loathing of immigrants, minorities and hapless foreign nations like Venezuela attests to his high emotional intelligence.

It doesn’t matter that his evidence is thin, that he often contradicts himself, or that he changes his mind radically from day to day. Emotions don’t follow reason. He knows how to get voters where they live, in their amygdalas, not their cerebral cortices. That’s how emotional intelligence works.

I have a theory, which I modestly call “Dratler’s Law.” The very worst leaders are those with high emotional intelligence and low analytical intelligence. They can get voters (and soldiers!) to do what they want, such as gassing helpless innocents at Auschwitz, or cheering the violent deportation of honest laborers doing work that no citizen will do at the same price. But they can’t conceive of effective solutions to real problems, let alone solutions that make most people happy most of the time. Their “solutions” range from ineffective to cruel, brutal and catastrophic. Hitler, Stalin and Mao (in his dotage) were all like that, and our current president is the closest we’ve ever come to that model.

Oddly enough, the patron Saint of modern Republicans was a bit like that, although of course not nearly as bad. With his Irish charm, Ronald Reagan could beguile voters and adversaries alike. On waking from surgery after an attempt on his life, he smiled weakly and told his wife “Honey, I forgot to duck!” Referring to the Berlin Wall that then divided West Germany from its Soviet-occupried eastern half, he told then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, “Tear down this wall!” And it happened, because Gorbachev had both high analytical and high emotional intelligence.

Yet Reagan famously derided necessary taxes with the cry “It’s your money!” With that simple mantra, he began our nation’s apotheosis of greed, contrary to the analysis of every great leader from Jesus on, and contrary to the teachings of every organized religion, including Islam.

But I digress. The bare dichotomy between analytical and emotional intelligence misses some nuance. We have to “turn off” our fast thinking in order even to access our cortices and slow thinking. That’s the way our brains are wired: our amygdalas are the gateways to our cortices, as is required for our physical survival. (The saber-toothed tiger’s shadow had to wake us from our ruminations about God, lest we not survive to pass on our genes.)

So there’s another aspect of emotional intelligence that I think gets far too little press. Because it’s so important, I made up a new word for it: “calmth.”

Of all the public figures of my 80 years, MLK had it most and best. His slow-paced, resonant voice I can still hear in my head, on command. It lowered my blood pressure on hearing, better than any BP med.

His iconic “I have a dream!” speech apparently had that same effect on Americans generally. Their heart rates dropped and their empathy came into play. Then they were able to ask themselves, quite analytically, “whom does this gross and mindless discrimination really benefit? Does it make sense to suppress the work and immiserate the lives of one out of every twelve Americans?”

The analytical answers, of course, are “no one” and “no.” With that emotional/analytical one-two punch, MLK set the national tone for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. Even with LBJ famously having the “peckers [of arch-segregationists] in mah pocket”, LBJ never could have gotten those bills passed without MLK preparing the national emotional groundwork.

MLK had high analytical intelligence, too. In a speech in 1967, breaking with LBJ on the Vietnam War, he predicted precisely what continuing that senseless war would do to our national politics, our economic success. and our general welfare. MLK never entered electoral politics, but IMHO he would have made a great president.

But I digress again. As we’ve seen, great leaders need both analytical intelligence and emotional intelligence. And a big part of emotional intelligence is “calmth”: the ability to get voters and subordinates to think with their cortices, not their amygdalas, and to encourage just enough empathy so neighbors can think about what might be best for everybody.

Empathy is, after all, the father and the mother of peace and cooperation, which are precisely the evolutionary advantages that let our species dominate our small blue planet. Can the lessons of our own evolution be wrong?

So what pols in our nation today have these key traits? I see only two, so far, that best display them: Pete Buttigieg and Wes Moore, Maryland’s governor. Both are members of minority groups, openly gay and Black people, respectively. So, if I’m right that they are the best, we’re going to have to abandon our prejudices to have the best chance of surviving (let alone thriving) as a nation.

Though they look and sound quite different, Buttigieg and Moore have three things in common. The first is self-evidently superior analytical intelligence. For Buttigieg, it appears in his debates and press interviews. He speaks in complete sentences and paragraphs. His ideas are always thoughtful, and often novel and creative, if not unique to him. He has the air of a college professor meeting with his best students to discuss smart ways to solve problems. I think these qualities—not his sexual orientation—are what have attracted far more press attention to him than a former small-town mayor and Secretary of Transportation otherwise deserves.

Since Moore has gotten far less national press attention, his high analytical intelligence is less well publicized. For me, it appeared during his victory-night speech as governor-elect. A former Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, he summarized the key principles of the Western Enlightenment in five minutes, in simple, common language. Also in that speech, and in his follow-up as governor, he’s worked to provide free pre-K education for all of Maryland’s children. His rationale: science says that’s the best way to develop our kids’ brains.

When was the last time you heard a politician recommend doing something at the local and family level because science says it’s the right thing to do? Think we’ll ever get anything like that from RFK, Jr.?

The second thing that Buttigieg and Moore have in common is emotional intelligence in general, and that “calmth” thing in particular. I must have watched a dozen debates and/or press conferences involving Buttigieg, and I have never once seen him lose his cool. Even in responding to harsh, unjustified criticism, he always answered calmly, rationally, as if analyzing a problem in a graduate seminar.

Moore displayed this quality superbly in his press conference after the disastrous collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore Harbor. He politely let the federal rep speak first. Then he gently stepped forward and, with a calm, measured, almost apologetic mien, he told us accurately and factually what had happened and how it was going to get fixed. Not a word of blame or recrimination. Just the facts, a bit of hope, and some welcome realism about how long the bridge would be closed.

The third thing Buttigieg and Moore have in common is combat experience in our military. I saved this for last because I think it’s the most important.

I’m no militarist myself. I dodged the draft (entirely legally) during the late sixties and early seventies. I avoided service in Vietnam by staying in graduate school in physics, even though I wasn’t entirely sure it was the best career choice for me. After a few years employment as a scientist, I switched to law school, practiced business law, and became a law professor.

But now, with what I hope is the wisdom of age, I recognize three facts of life. First, the conversion to an “all-volunteer” military by abolishing the draft has cost us as a nation. No longer do rich or “elite” kids have to serve. That in itself deprives our military of talent, as well as influence among our oligarchs and aristocrats. It also puts the burden of service on the poor, the marginalized and those who have no other ladder of opportunity.

Second, I have no doubt that former SecDef Lloyd J. Austin III and Joint Chiefs Chairman Charles Q. Brown, Jr.—both Black men—were dismissed for reasons of politics and failure to show personal loyalty, not incompetence. I believe they were (and are) the best of the best, if only because they rose to the very top in a still-racist society. So in their important cases, our degraded politics deprived us of our best military leaders at a critical time when we may need them most. (I won’t tarnish their reputations or dignify the undignifiable by comparing either with Hegseth.)

Finally—and most important—consider the damage that abolishing the draft has done to the fairness of our society and the competence of our Executive Branch. The last US president to have served in combat in our armed forces was George Herbert Walker Bush, who presided from 1989-1993, over a generation and a half ago.

Three consequences are self-evident: (1) We go to war too easily, as in Afghanistan and Iraq. (2) Our top civilian leaders have neither experience in combat nor experiential empathy for those who fight. (3) Our political leaders often look at war through the lenses of ideology and wishful thinking; they do not weigh, let alone accurately, the blood, guts, disorder and suffering that war produces. (I don’t see either Venezuela or Iran as a real war, at least not yet, because of their limited scopes and impacts so far.)

My last point is the most important. Military service in combat is perhaps the best way to test and nurture leadership skills. There’s no better test for quick and practical decision-making, especially where (as is so often the case in combat) there may be no good option, only less bad ones. And nothing tests one’s ability to form and grow bonds of trust and confidence with one’s peers and subordinates the way combat does.

People who reason a priori from ideology and airy abstractions, the way Aristotle did and George Will routinely does, do not make good leaders in combat. Those whose goals are too impractical, or who cannot temper their ambition, their anger or their impatience, end up “fragged” or shot in the back by their underlings, as so many low-level leaders in our pointless war in Vietnam reportedly did.

In contrast to the vast majority of our pols today, Pete Buttigieg and Wes Moore both served in our armed forces, and both served in combat zones. Buttigieg never took fire, but he served “outside the wire” as an intelligence officer and driver for his commander in Kabul. Moore got a Combat Action Badge for direct enemy engagement. Although a draft dodger myself, I see a crying need for more civilian leaders like them.

My belief that both these men got their “calmth” and empathy from military service is part speculation. Maybe these qualities were just innate. But whatever their source, these men deserve far more attention from our press and our media than they are getting at the moment. Moore, in particular, deserves far greater publicity, although perhaps he’s the kind of guy who shuns it and just wants to do his job. If so, the more’s the pity (pardon the pun).

Today the norm for ambitious pols is to posture and preen ad nauseum. The “press” devotes far too much attention to their preening, and (in my view) far too little to those who have the qualities that make good leaders. For example, I’d like to hear much more about Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s governor, and James Talarico, a soft-spoken white Texan and devout Christian who professes to practice his religion as Jesus would and just won the Democratic primary in the race for the job of Republican Senator John Cornyn.

Our “press,” IMHO, is doing an execrable job helping us evaluate potential national leaders. Like negligent parents, the press devotes all its attention to the child crying “Look at me!” most loudly. That mistake gave us such paragons of national leadership as Marjorie Taylor Greene. It has also enabled the worst president in our history, a long line of congressional lackeys, and a succession of self-promoting presidential contenders who inspire confidence in no one but themselves and perhaps a few extremists.

Isn’t it time to start looking at leaders of real quality, who spend their time doing their jobs well and not just clamoring for attention? We’ve got close to three years. But if the press and we voters don’t do our homework, 2028 may see the last election we’ll ever have.