Voters should look for vision, moral authority, ability to lead

e-mail this story discuss this issue in our forums Guest column • Dr. Jim Silliman: ZestQuest will help trim child obesity (02/23/04) • Werner Fornos: Population growth abroad draining state's jobs (02/22/04) • Ed Leap: Trick of calendar keeps time in a bottle (02/22/04) • Bill Whitney: Viola Street Community a developing success story (02/20/04) • Gene and Champ Covington: Our community is unmatched in its commitment to caring (02/18/04) More details Walter Ezell, who grew up in Greenville, owns a graphic design and printing business. He can be reached at waltezell@aol.com.

Amid the clamor of men to become a challenger to George W. Bush, it helps to observe that the office they seek, touted as the "most powerful office in the world," has little intrinsic power. The power we attribute to the office actually comes from our belief the power is there. "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."

But (as the deposed president of Georgia, Eduard Shevardnadze, can recently attest) it sometimes happens that a putative head of state blows his trumpet and no one responds.

The power of a president is the power he brings to the office — the power to persuade, to warn and inspire, the power of wisdom and moral authority. Thus some presidents are weak and others are strong. And some of the most powerful people in history (think Christ, think Gandhi) held no office, and others (think Martin Luther King) held offices that were an outgrowth of their power, not the source of it.

In times of crisis, sometimes the office seeks a powerful person to fill it, such as Lincoln or Churchill.

It is a weakness of our system of presidential elections that in time of crisis it is not always possible to break our contract with an elected leader and induct a needed successor in a timely way. What if England had had to endure another three years of Neville Chamberlain as America endured three years of Herbert Hoover after the stock market crashed in 1929?

At the moment he took office, neither George W. Bush nor anyone else dreamed of the challenges he would face. Often this is so, and it is almost certain that if we choose a leader this year based on the candidate's platform, he will later have to cope with some great issue that none of the position papers took into account.

All of this is to say that when we vote Tuesday, we should weigh character, vision, moral authority and the ability to persuade, more than any single litmus issue with which we agree or disagree.

Many people, of course, will weigh each candidate's "electability," the touted ability of each candidate to defeat George Bush. This is not entirely wrongheaded, as electability is a back-door way to measure a candidate's ability to persuade. But the discussions of electability we have heard seem burdened with myth, speculation and outright superstition.

So we hear that governors running for president do well and senators don't. We hear that candidates from Massachusetts do poorly, but those from the South do well. But how about the re-election prospects of presidents from Texas who fight controversial wars? How about war-hero senators from Massachusetts whose initials are JFK?

This reminds me of the sports broadcasters who cite statistics about how often a team wins when it is ahead in the ninth inning and the bases are loaded. Past results are not a predictor of future performance. Those who believe otherwise are in the thrall of superstition. They invest in systems for picking winning lottery numbers. And sometimes they are elected president.

We have now a president who seems most superstitious. Something worked for another president — cutting taxes, going to the moon, invading Iraq — so he thinks it will work for him. George W. Bush may have the most derivative presidency in history. But what works in one context may fail in another.

Bush's leadership is at once moralistic and morally vacuous. His idea of family values is to spend the money of the unborn on tax cuts for the wealthy. Future generations will despise him for this. It is our mission Tuesday to help rescue our nation from this visionless bungler. If we fail in this mission or, worse, if we accede to his $300 tax-cutting bribe to the middle class, we are trading the children's birthright for a mess of pottage.

When I vote, I will consider electability only in the sense that I will discard any candidate who is clearly not electable. Beyond that, my choice will be to seek a leader who can do more than parry the rhetorical thrusts of Bush in a debate. I will be looking for the man with a positive vision, moral authority and the ability to lead us against challenges as yet unseen.