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The Japanese, virtually tribal in their consensual citizenship, have a fairly smooth decision-making process. The Prime Minister, a product of the Diet (Parliament), reports weekly to the legislature in what Columbia Law School's Michael Young calls an "environment of interaction, conciliation and accountability." In addition, Japanese politicians "engage in continual and intense negotiation with the private sector." In America, the President and Congress constantly collide, as do the Government and business.
America is individualistic and pluralistic, alive with thousands of competing constituencies and interests, and every one of them, it seems, is flanked by a team of lawyers. Leadership is difficult in a litigious society that also tends to want everything spelled out in contracts. Legalism is the enemy of innovation and improvisation. Yet it will be extremely difficult for Americans to compete in the new world markets unless they get much better at both innovating and improvising.
Henry Adams remarked after the Civil War that anyone wishing to disprove Darwin's theory had only to trace the evolution of the American presidency from George Washington to Ulysses Grant. Americans have often cherished a sort of golden-age theory of the presidency. They look back on, say, Harry Truman and John Kennedy as historical giants. In fact, neither man looked all that imposing when he was in the White House. Truman was often vilified as an undistinguished little haberdasher, utterly unfit to succeed a demigod like Franklin Roosevelt. Those underwhelmed by the current presidential candidates might remember that much civilized American opinion in 1860 regarded Abraham Lincoln as a half-literate backwoods disaster.
Paul Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, has joined with Edmund Muskie, Elliot Richardson, Harvard President Derek Bok and others to form a National Commission on the Public Service. The commission's hope is to develop leadership for the public sector. A member of the group is John Brademas, a Congressman for 22 years and now president of New York University. Says Brademas: "Leadership can be summed up in two words -- intelligence and integrity, or to use two synonyms, competence and character. We don't see those characteristics in Government today. Reagan and his Administration have established a national attitude of 'Get what you can get for yourself while you can.' A sense of values does not permeate this Administration."
A political scientist, Michael Nelson, has observed that the Presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to John Kennedy were generally portrayed as Saviors. Johnson and Nixon were cartooned as Satans, and Ford and Carter as Samsons -- weak Presidents shorn of their strength. Reagan seems to invite the thought that he has found a new model, the Salesman, in the last act, standing on a stage about to go dark.
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