Transformational Leadership or Constitutional Statesmanship?

Lots of politicians make promises they can’t keep. Statesmen, by contrast, promise less and deliver more. Knowing their own limitations and those of the people they serve, they act according to principles, not just promises.

As a presidential candidate Barack Obama promised the American people nothing less than a new nation. “. . . We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” he said just before he was elected president in November 2008.

Since his victory the president has made very clear his reverence for the idea of transformational leadership. He has identified “transformative moments” that must be seized, lauded “leaders who are able to bring about transformative change,” and heralded his administration’s steps towards “a transformation of how government works.”

The president’s efforts to make his idea of “transformational leadership” real are everywhere. Whether in massive bailouts, sweeping health care reform legislation, an attempt to overhaul the student loan system, or a proposed revamping of financial regulations, the president has sought a transformation of huge swaths of American life with little regard to the constitutionality of these efforts.

Mr. Obama has done all of this while at the same time linking his idea of transformation to the sixteenth American president. Asked in July 2009 who his heroes are, President Obama singled out Abraham Lincoln for the highest praise.

The president’s admiration both of Lincoln and the idea of transformational leadership is perplexing, because for Lincoln the idea of “transformational leadership” was not just foreign, but something he had to fight.

Lincoln’s fundamental cause was not changing the American political form, or regime, but preserving it. The American regime was one of rights, Lincoln held, and slavery struck at the heart of the American regime. The Confederacy was a regime not built upon universal rights of equality and liberty but rather a dangerous act of rebellion. Its form of government was illegitimate.

Three years before the Confederacy’s birth, in 1858, Mr. Lincoln was locked in political battle to unseat the “Little Giant,” Illinois Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas. In a July 1858 debate with Douglas, in Chicago, Mr. Lincoln assailed the mighty incumbent for three erroneous positions, including Douglas’s denial of the truth of the Declaration of Independence; his support of the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, which made slaves no better than animals; and his advancement of the doctrine of popular sovereignty, which said that each state should have the right to decide whether it would allow slavery or not.

“Now I ask you in all soberness,” Lincoln said, “if all these things, if indulged in, if ratified, if confirmed and endorsed, if taught to our children, and repeated to them, do not tend to rub out the sentiment of liberty in the country, and to transform this Government into a government of some other form.”

For Lincoln, Douglas represented a kind of transformational leadership, one in which his ideology would trump the truths of the Declaration and the Constitution. In the over two million words Lincoln spoke or wrote it seems that he used the word “transform” only that one time in the 1858 debate with Douglas.

Transformation talk today is commonplace, especially in an age in which many universities offer courses in “transformational leadership.” Introduced in 1978 by presidential scholar James MacGregor Burns, the idea of “transformational leadership” gained common currency as management consultants and motivational gurus seized upon it as fodder for their books. Contrasting various modes of leadership, Burns and his followers emphasize that the “transformational” leader is followed by others because of his personality and ability to effect change. In short, the “transformational leader” has the “vision thing.”

Lincoln sought the preservation of America, not its transformation. Rather than envisioning a new future, he appealed to the old moral, political, and social truths of liberty and equality. These were true not by dint of his personality, but because they are universal and reasonable. Lincoln was the servant of enduring constitutional principles so that he could end slavery and preserve the Union.

America today needs not “transformational leadership,” but constitutional statesmanship.

Compared to the idea of “transformational leadership,” the idea of constitutional statesmanship now seems out of place, like shouting “Give me liberty or give me death!” in a movie theater. Yet given the choice of further attempts at the unconstitutional transformation of the country, or seeking to be a statesman much better attuned to the Constitution, the president in his second year in office might better heed the example of his hero Lincoln.

For Lincoln, the Constitution was inviolable. He knew that the presidential oath he took to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution defined his responsibility. More than any other promise a president makes it matters most.