So Hermann developed an "assessment-at-a-distance tool" that she uses to study world leaders using their interviews, speeches, and writings. As Hermann says, "only movie stars, rock groups, and professional athletes leave more traces of their behavior in the public arena than politicians. For many years, Hermann did the analysis manually, reading transcripts to look for evidence of seven traits deemed important by historians, biographers, journalists, psychologists, and political scientists - traits influencing not only what leaders themselves did, but the behavior of the organizations they led.
The traits include the leaders' belief in their ability to control what happens; their need for power; their conceptual complexity viewing the world as black-and-white versus shades of gray ; their self-confidence; the degree to which they focus on problem solving versus relationship building; their distrust of others; and how strongly they identify with a group such as party, government, religion, or country.
Manually coding this analysis was tedious. Then two developments revolutionized her process. The first was the Internet, which provided easier access to materials on political leaders. The second was computer software. While Hermann was a professor at Ohio State University, a doctoral student approached her with the idea of automating the coding. LTA software accommodates larger volumes of data, creates more reliable coding, and controls for coder bias.
It allows for depths of analysis almost impossible to do manually - such as comparing an individual's traits over time, comparing responses by context e.
Hermann and her students have collected data on more than world leaders since By profiling a large number of leaders in a region, culture, or country, Hermann is able to assess a leader in comparison with others from his culture or country.
The LTA software can analyze many types of leaders, not just heads of state. She and Hermann have assessed the leadership of U. She says most researchers based such assessments on organizational structures.
Hermann, I saw there is a way to measure the impact of people's leadership styles that's completely scientific and statistically sound. Having been a political science master's student at the University of Wyoming interested in political leaders and foreign policy, she came to Maxwell specifically to study with Hermann. Today, as Hermann's graduate assistant, Derkson manages the licensing of the Leadership Trait Analysis software to educational users while working on her dissertation, which examines how regime type and political context affect the kind of leaders that get elected.
She'll draw from data Hermann and students have collected for more than a decade. That's a power dynamic that has long lent itself to abuse.
Throughout history, some politicians have treated high office as a candy shop for the unrestrained libido. That puts elected lawmakers in much the same position as a Hollywood mogul such as Harvey Weinstein or a news media titan such as Charlie Rose.
But once Weinstein fell, exposed as a predator, expectations in Congress quickly shifted. It's hard to find a congressional staffer who hasn't heard about, experienced or witnessed creepy or inappropriate behavior. The Hill has long had its whisper networks of staffers and journalists warning colleagues not to get into an elevator alone with a particular lawmaker or chief of staff. No doubt the sexism and harassment festered because Congress long exempted itself from workplace enforcement laws — laws it applied to other employers.
Capitol Hill remained an island. Each of the House members and senators ran a small fiefdom. The only real check: the threat of being ousted in the next election, if any especially egregious behavior came to light. Being caught in bed with a live goat or a dead boy, as the saying goes.
In an ordinary workplace, a worker and a supervisor both have legal recourse when an allegation is leveled. If our experience offers any guide, the election of Donald Trump would lead to disaster for the United States, and a worse disaster for Donald Trump. By the end of his first term, even his worst enemies would pity him. The United States might well simply lose four years, in the sense that Rob Ford's term as mayor stopped some important initiatives cold and brought no new ones to the table.
Of course, losing direction in a city government, even an alpha world city, has many fewer potential consequences than dysfunctional or even malignant government in the planet's leading economic and military power. Unlike Donald Trump. Rob Ford had and has expertise in responsive government; he got elected partly on his well earned reputation as the quickest councillor to return phone calls.
Unfortunately, even a major city mayor cannot handle the whole business of a city by returning phone calls, and most analysis I have seen suggests that Rob Ford quickly found himself well out of his depth as mayor. The mismatch between Donald Trump and the skill set required of an American president appears much greater. How did we get here? Dionne in his new book Why the Right Went Wrong.
A video version has just gone up on the Kentucky Educational Television site, with a good description of E. Wave after wave of conservative leaders is unable to do so. This road leads to Cruz and Trump. Again, for the full version consult this very illuminating book. Also consider the video below. As Donald Trump moves closer to the Republican nomination, his public presentation becomes increasingly deranged, as with this notorious item from last night as discussed by Emma Green here :.
Barring the unforeseen, one of the five people now running will become Commander in Chief next year, and most likely one of these two: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. With that in mind, and before I need to go offline for several days on a different project, here is one more installment from readers on the candidates and the choice.
He displayed real understanding of no topics, and gross mis-understanding of many. He shunted all answers back to the two themes he can discuss: how he is a winner relative to losers like low-energy Jeb and Little Marco; and how big his hands are.
Trump used to be amusing, in a pro-wrestling way. Now he is manifestly not-normal, in an ominous way. Why bring this up? I think, number two, we should have had our prisoners before the negotiations started.
We should have doubled up the sanctions. First of all, we didn't "give" any money to Iran. Other countries had been holding Iran's money, at our request, while negotiations were on going. It was hard enough to get China and Russia on board with sanctions to begin with.
And what evidence is there that Iran would capitulate in the face of increased sanctions? The goal of the negotiations was the minimize the threat of a nuclear Iran. Increased sanctions did not reduce that threat without direct negotiations. Iran had centrifuges in By the time President Obama took office, that number went up to 8, Four years later, the number was 22, And all of this happened in the face of brutal sanctions. For Trump to blithely say doubling sanctions would secure the release of those hostages flies in the face of fact because sanctions failed to do what they were implemented to do to begin with….
So, yes, positions and reasoning like this, in a sane political climate, would disqualify Trump as a candidate. But we're not in a sane political climate, and I believe something that your friend Mike Lofgren has referred to as "anti-knowledge" has taken root within the GOP.
Thus, ignorance of facts is worn as a badge of honor. Does one really have to have the guy on the couch in an office to get a better sense of him?
It also suggests a man who is almost entirely un-self-aware. One would think that a competent professional could make a reasonable armchair diagnosis of Trump. Earlier I posted some messages from readers asking whether Trump had some identifiable personality disorder.
The statements he has placed on the public record are in themselves grounds for concern. Since according to Sanders AIPAC declined to let him speak by video, as some previous Republican candidates have done, he merely issued the written text. That is where a reader in Minnesota picks up, and explains why, as a Democrat, he is having a hard time with her:. I just read your post which began with the Safire quote describing Ms.
Clinton as a congenital liar. Those who support her while admitting the above claim that she simply deserves the office——but have never been able to provide a cogent argument as to why she, and she alone, deserves to be President.
Those who do not support her are quite worried that she will actually expand upon the NeoCon expansionism, warmongering, and international intervention behavior of the Bush Administration. I have come to believe this is correct, and very troubling. You and I have traveled extensively over the years.
I just returned from Indonesia, where the American election is gaining a lot of attention, and not in a very positive way. As I continue to watch and study the behavior of all the candidates, it seems that Ms. Clinton would become the most internationally aggressive of all with the possible exception of the certifiably sociopathic Ted Cruz.
If the Brussels attacks are significant in any way, it seems that they signal among many other things that continued expansion and pro-Israel blind support cannot possibly bring us any closer to peace and security——and are more likely to bring the opposite result.
Trump election. Writing in Bernie Sanders name may be dysfunctional and perhaps even wrongbut I cannot imagine any other choice that would allow my conscience to remain at peace. I have come to expect that almost every politician tells the occasional if not the regular lie——except for your former boss and my favorite President of my lifetime. One thing for sure, neither the Republicans nor Democrats are able to reform themselves. The Sanders campaign has its own role, playing the dead canary warning Democrats of toxic times ahead.
And they deserve it. Meanwhile, the economy lost its productive muscle and began its decades-long tilt descent towards finance and oligarchy. Maybe it takes a demogogue to shake things up. It would be wrong to think all these Trump supporters are racist deadbeats, as too many liberals are quick to judge.
And who knows? Close body contact of a volatile and dangerous type. Which way all this will go is unclear. No one's going to beat Trump calling him racist and xenophobic. Only someone equally as bold and icon-shattering as Trump can compete. Few policy wonks qualify. Nothing in the public sphere has given me such hope for years.
I volunteered for Obama in and voted for him twice, and think he has been a great success under difficult circumstances. I feel nothing like that for either of the Dem candidates this time. Many of my friends are passionate Bernie supporters. As one of your other readers stated, I fear he would be a very ineffective president who would damage liberalism for a long time.
I question his temperament and particularly his ability to withstand adversity these are particular areas of strength for Obama. Bernie becomes irate, defensive, even whiny, when subjected to tough questions by reporters, and his incessant complaining about media coverage is just annoying.
What will he do as President when the Tea Party Congress craps all over his proposals, or when Putin or Bibi attempts to humiliate him publicly? I wish Elizabeth Warren were running because our choices are uninspiring. I have very mixed feelings about Hillary even though I voted for her in the primary.
Bottom line for me is that despite her flaws, I think she will be a reasonably effective president. I worry about her coziness with Wall Street and her judgment in moments of crisis, domestic and international. I did not like her recent hawkish speech to AIPAC and worry that she will squander the good will Obama has managed to build in the Islamic world. She seems to struggling a little to adapt her sometimes dated political rhetoric to the current landscape example: her unfortunate comments about the Reagans and AIDS, her awkward attempts to address mass incarceration and the Black Lives Matter movement.
I would like to see our home grown Dems here in San Antonio, Julian and Joaquin Castro, move into more prominent roles in the future as I think they have great potential. I can see a lot of older white voters hesitant to vote for ticket that includes a woman and a Latino. I think he has much more to contribute. Hillary Clinton is far from the first strong woman in public life to be slandered relentlessly by her political opponents and those offended by feminine leadership.
Let us take a brief tour. Wu Zetian - was the only female emperor of China. Despite being a strong ruler who governed well, her reputation as a scheming, ruthless woman willing to do anything to gain and keep power overwhelmed her accomplishments.
Eleanor of Aquitaine - was Queen of France, then Queen of England, and the mother of three kings of England. Catherine de Medici - was Queen of France from to and played a leading role in the Byzantine power struggles among the French nobility during the Wars of Religion between Catholics and Protestants.
Though clearly no better or worse than the Bourbons and Guises and other rivals for power, Catherine—as not only a woman but a foreigner, being the daughter of Lorenzo de Medici of Florence—got most of the blame for a host of poisonings, assassinations, and political back-stabbings.
Catherine the Great ruled Russia for more than thirty years. Compared with other Russian emperors, she was clearly above average as a reformer and a supporter of Enlightenment ideals.
Like her male counterparts, she took lovers, but the stories told about her falsely accused her not just of licentiousness, but of perversion. These slanders culminated in the rumor that she died from a stroke suffered while attempting to have sexual intercourse with a stallion. Empress Dowager Cixi of China was a remarkable woman who began her imperial career as a lowly concubine but ended up as the mother of the heir to the throne and, as Regent, the nominal ruler of China for decades.
Surrounded by powerful factions in a dying empire, Cixi successfully navigated among them but was slandered as vicious, sexually perverse, manipulative, extravagant, power-hungry, and so on.
So is Hillary the devious, lying, scheming, ambitious, ruthless harridan that the Republicans say she is? And do you know the story of the servant girl that Cixi murdered by throwing her down a well? I made one very bad call about the election, which I quickly confessed! To be fair, I made a very good call two cycles earlier concerning the Trump of that era, Sarah Palin.
Because running for national office is a lot, lot harder than it looks. And if you come to it with no experience, you are simply guaranteed to make a lot of gaffes. Unless you have seen it first first-hand, as part of the press scrum or as a campaign staffer, it is almost impossible to imagine how grueling the process of running for national office is… The candidates have to answer questions and offer views roughly 18 hours a day, and any misstatement on any topic can get them in trouble.
Why do candidates so often stick to a stump speech that they repeat event after event and day after day? Because they've worked out the exact way to put their positions on endless thorny issues -- Iraq, abortion, the Middle East, you name it -- and they know that creative variation mainly opens new complications.
The point about every one of those issues is that there is a certain phrase or formulation that might seem perfectly innocent to a normal person but that can cause a big uproar.
Without going into the details, there is all the difference in the world between saying "Taiwan and mainland China" versus "Taiwan and China. So back in I was arguing that in just two months on the campaign trail, no beginner in national-level campaigning, like Palin, could learn all the lingo on these issues. Thus gaffes were sure to ensue, as they did. Ah the plucky life of the reporter.
Trump could! And did. Leading to this Onion -esque but apparently serious emission yesterday:. You can never count him out, but the damage is beginning to show. He is a more resourceful performer than Sarah Palin was, and he has changed politics more than she could. But she is actually better informed than he is , and finally that is catching up with him.
Yesterday I quoted a reader about the book The Revolt of the Masses, by Jose Ortega y Gasset, which was published in but is uncomfortably relevant in the age of climate-change denialism and of Donald Trump. A reader named Paul, in Texas, objects to the reasoning in a post I cited as a guide to Revolt. Someone's problem in acquiring the necessary permits or licenses to carry out their business might be helped by a phone call to the local civil servants.
One of the inevitable problems in rural India is about the delimitation and measurement of land and again a powerful politician will be able to 'encourage' the local tehsildar, patwari, lekhpal or other members of the revenue and administrative services to see their supplicant's point of view. Finally, with an increasingly difficult agricultural market and shrinking land parcels, the successful politician is also able to 'persuade' the local manager of a public sector bank to 'expedite' the release of loans.
Rajkamal Singh of the Trivedi Political Data Centre argues, the solution is often as much about the thana or tehsil not interfering as it is about their intervention. Inevitably, these politicians are also able to build financial bases for themselves by using their relationships with these institutions to get government contracts, land allotments, licenses and other facilities as well as, of course, taking the help of police and the civil services in stamping out any opposition.
The Samajwadi party and the Bahujan Samaj Party have been politically successful because they have created a political structure that is firmly based on and revolves around providing easy points of access to the thana, tehsil and bank. Their workers and indeed political leaders are local, accessible and have a firm grip on the these institutions.
Apart from developing similar local power structures, the BJP also deploys its ideological vision in order to attract workers to its cause.
In all this, the Congress falls woefully short because not only does it lack loyal workers but also more importantly it does not have local leaders who can manage to provide easy and efficient access to the institutional triumvirate of the thana, tehsil and bank.
Perceptions are not just about real political clout but also about superficial markers. Indian politicians are often lambasted for how flashy they are. However, this preoccupation with 'flash' should not be simply dismissed as a tiresome desire to show-off.
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