Urging leaders to tell the truth in an era dominated by social media

It’s Sunday morning, and a good question for the day is “What would happen if leaders told their followers the truth?” Tom Friedman at the NY Times concludes that the radical notion of truth telling by our leaders may be the best response to the rise of popularism in the era of Facebook and Twitter. Friedman’s column begins:

TRAVELING in Europe last week, it seemed as if every other conversation ended with some form of this question: Why does it feel like so few leaders are capable of inspiring their people to meet the challenges of our day? There are many explanations for this global leadership deficit, but I’d focus on two: one generational, one technological.

Let’s start with the technological. In 1965, Gordon Moore, the Intel co-founder, posited Moore’s Law, which stipulated that the processing power that could be placed on a single microchip would double every 18 to 24 months. It’s held up quite well since then. Watching European, Arab and U.S. leaders grappling with their respective crises, I’m wondering if there isn’t a political corollary to Moore’s Law: The quality of political leadership declines with every 100 million new users of Facebook and Twitter.

The wiring of the world through social media and Web-enabled cellphones is changing the nature of conversations between leaders and the led everywhere. We’re going from largely one-way conversations — top-down — to overwhelmingly two-way conversations — bottom-up and top-down. This has many upsides: more participation, more innovation and more transparency. But can there be such a thing as too much participation — leaders listening to so many voices all the time and tracking the trends that they become prisoners of them?

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“Obama Overwhelmed, and Unappreciative of Tsunami of Populist Outrage”

Jonathan Martin at Politico wraps it up this morning for the Gray Lady whose liberal columnists not very long ago were gushing over the ever so smooth and clever presidential candidate whom they once declared heralded a new age to be hereafter known as “the Time of Obama.”

Martin reports:

The leading liberal voices of the New York Times editorial pages all criticized—and, in some cases, clobbered—President Obama on Sunday for his handling of the economy and national security.

It's not unusual for Barack Obama to take a little friendly fire from the Times. But it's perhaps unprecedented for him to get hit on the same day by columnists Frank Rich, Thomas Friedman and Maureen Dowd—and in the paper's lead editorial. Their critique punctuated a weekend that started with a widely circulated blog post by Paul Krugman that said the president’s yet to be announced bank rescue plan would almost certainly fail. {It should be noted that Krugman was a Hillary Clinton supporter during the Democratic primary.}

The sentiment, coming just two months after the president was sworn in, reflects elite opinion in the Washington-New York corridor that Obama is increasingly overwhelmed, and not fully appreciative of the building tsunami of populist outrage.

Unlike with President Bush, the Obama administration is less apt to dismiss such commentary, at least publicly, as so much carping from an out-of-touch peanut gallery. These are voices that have been sympathetic, and at times gushing toward Obama, during the campaign and in his administration’s early days.

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Is the Punditry Finally Waking Up to the Danger of Electing a President With No Relevant Job Experience?

Yesterday, I linked to Tom Friedman’s column at the NY Times in which the native Minnesotan almost overcomes his regional niceness to acknowledge that our “talented young president with many good instincts” took office without a trace of relevant experience and is now under pressure to learn on the job in a potentially catastrophic period in American history.

In today’s Washington Post column titled Running on Empty, David Broder leads off with this startling paragraph:

As if the problems in the U.S. and world economies were not enough of a challenge in themselves, the young Obama administration is also being called on to figure out simultaneously how to govern in such an emergency.

Broder explains:

A big part of the second challenge lies in reconciling the pressure to move rapidly in rolling out its program initiatives with the much slower pace of assembling the leaders it needs to be able to function at all.

In its first six weeks in office, the administration has launched hugely expensive and ambitious programs, not only to spur employment and arrest a sickening slide in stocks, mortgages and profits, but to overhaul such complex and vital services as health care, education, and energy production and conservation.

And here’s the scary part:

It has done this with a mere corporal's guard of key appointees in place. The White House itself is rather fully staffed, but the departments and agencies, where broad policies must be converted into real operations, have numerous openings. Decisions are being made by career bureaucrats, Bush administration carryovers -- or not at all.

Broder concludes with a quote from a former Clinton staffer that nails the Obama Administration with a problem his predecessor never quite figured out – learning the difference between campaigning and governing:

A veteran of the Clinton White House said she worried that the administration is still in a campaign mind-set, with the president and vice president on the road every week promoting their programs. "The only thing that's important now is getting the money out the door, so it can start to work in the real world," she said. "Anything that distracts from that is a waste of time."

Oh, for the equivalent of the experienced and well-trained Chesley Sullenberger in command of America’s ship of state in these troubled times.