Leaders gain respect and support through merit, not by begging and pleading, Please, please respect me, lend me your support, I'm a Leader, honest! They are born, not made, which is to say they are real, not something cooked up in a press packet. They have foresight--they can see an opportunity; they have insight--they know if they should take the opportunity; and they have hindsight--if it was a mistake, they learn from it.
More importantly, Leaders have vision. They know who they are, they know where they are going, and they know how to get there. Even more important than that, they know you are following. They know that you're along for the ride, that you're looking to them to lead you, and they take that responsibility with the utmost respect, doing whatever it takes to make sure they don't let you down or leave you behind.
We hear a lot about Barack Obama. How he is like Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, the list goes on. The media has a field day playing Mad Libs with which former President they're going to liken him to next. Obama himself cannot figure out which former President he wants to be like. If you ask him a question, he has to shuffle through the rolodex and decide which former President he needs to invoke to properly answer the question. If he were a true Leader, he would know the proper decision is none.
Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and other great Leaders in America's past have one major thing in common: They were the right men for the job at the right time. To quote The Cohens, "They were The Dude for their time and place." They understood the issues of their times, the challenges facing them, and they did something about it.
Note to self: Need to get a better suit.Barack Obama is too busy acting like someone else to be a Leader. In difficult, challenging times, we have a Presidential Fanboy as our President. He was the boy who wanted to grow up to be Superman but never grew up. Now he's just a guy wearing a flashy suit, and his only superpower is to drop names of people he wishes he was like.
What we need in America is an American. Someone who believes in America, who believes in what it stands for, and who believes in what it is. Someone who is not ashamed to be an American, who is not afraid to be the example, and who is determined to lead the way. We need a Leader, we need them to be the right Leader, and we need them to be the Leader for this time and place.
Where will we find this Leader? Does he even exist? Is the America we love and cherish doomed to a future of faux leadership? Leaders who are nothing more than blow-up dummies, place-holding in the pilot's chair who already parachuted out of the crashing plane?
America is a land of hope. We never give up, and we never surrender. We need our Dude; the one for this time and place. We have to believe he is out there. It's just a matter of time before he stands up and speaks, and when he does there will be a great silence. And in that silence, someone in the 14th row will say, "Hey, this guy knows what he's doing!"
