Failure to Lead: An Explanation

Andrew Sullivan  at The Atlantic here posted this quote under a picture of the President. It took my breath away reading it. Not so much for the reason he may have wanted though, because if there is an eloquent description of why every attempt at bipartisanship and, more important, effective government, has failed in the Obama administration, this is it.

Or, for A Different View, the reason Obama’s Lincoln strategy won’t work is because he couldn’t, and wouldn’t, ever think of the world this way.

“When the conduct of men is designed to be influenced, persuasion, kind, unassuming persuasion, should ever be adopted. It is an old and a true maxim, that a “drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.” So with men.

If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend. Therein is a drop of honey that catches his heart, which, say what he will, is the great high road to his reason, and which, when once gained, you will find but little trouble in convincing his judgment of the justice of your cause, if indeed that cause really be a just one.

 On the contrary, assume to dictate to his judgment, or to command his action, or to mark him as one to be shunned and despised, and he will retreat within himself, close all the avenues to his head and his heart; and tho’ your cause be naked truth itself, transformed to the heaviest lance, harder than steel, and sharper than steel can be made, and tho’ you throw it with more than Herculean force and precision, you shall no more be able to pierce him, than to penetrate the hard shell of a tortoise with a rye straw.

Such is man, and so must he be understood by those who would lead him, even to his own best interest,” – Abraham Lincoln, address to the Washington Temperance Society in 1842.

The President should take this to heart and mind.