A quick morning read & action to share W/friends over your morning beverage of choice!
“UNDERSTANDING HILLARY
WHY THE CLINTON AMERICA
SEES ISN’T THE CLINTON COLLEAGUES KNOW
By Ezra Klein”
* A summary of Klein's lead: *
Klein is very
clear that his piece is not a profile of Hillary but more of a
fascinating peek into his brain as he tries to determine who Hillary
really is and if he thinks that is good on bad in the context of a
presidential candidate and a president.
Is she the
“careful, calculated, cautious” woman he views through the lens
of media who also gives boring speeches?
Or is she the
“brilliant, funny, thoughtful, effective” woman those who know
her describe her as?
He doesn't
buy her explanation of “the gap,” that years of negative attacks
on her have been absorbed by a large part of the population.
“Other
politicians find themselves under continuous assault, but their poll
numbers strengthen amid campaigns. Barack Obama’s approval rating
rose in the year of his reelection. So too did George W. Bush’s.
And Bill Clinton’s. All three sustained attacks. All three endured
opponents lobbing a mix of true and false accusations. But all three
seemed boosted by running for the job — if anything, people
preferred watching them campaign to watching them govern.
Hillary
Clinton is just the opposite. There is something about her persona
that seems uniquely vulnerable to campaigning; something is getting
lost in the Gap.”
So he
interviewed “Clinton's staffers, colleagues, friends, and foes”
asking: What is true about the Hillary Clinton you’ve worked with
that doesn’t come through on the campaign trail?
* My top 5
highlights, excerpted and edited by me: *
ONE
A former White House Chief of Staff references Hillary's
Senate race and Listening Tour in 2000:
“Many
of your colleagues in the press would call me and say, ‘This whole
listening thing is a joke. She’s surrounded by the Secret Service.
How will anyone get close to her?’” says Melanne Verveer...“What
they missed was she was actually listening! By the time she finished
those listening sessions around New York, she really knew more about
New York, about the issues there, about what was on people’s
minds.”
TWO
A Georgetown linguist, Tannen’s
research suggests a reason for the difference. Women, she’s found,
emphasize the “rapport dimension” of communication — did a
particular conversation bring us closer together or further apart?
Men, by contrast, emphasize the “status dimension” — did a
conversation raise my status compared to yours?
Talking is a
way of changing your status: If you make a great point, or set the
terms of the discussion, you win the conversation. Listening, on the
other hand, is a way of establishing rapport, of bringing people
closer together; showing you’ve heard what’s been said so far may
not win you the conversation, but it does win you allies. And winning
allies is how Hillary Clinton won the Democratic nomination.
One
way of reading the Democratic primary is that it pitted an unusually
pure male leadership style against an unusually pure female
leadership style. Sanders is a great talker and a poor relationship
builder. Clinton is a great relationship builder and a poor talker.
In this case — the first time at the presidential level — the
female leadership style won.
THREE
Elaine Kamarch argues the premise of her book, “Why
Presidents Fail:
Brookings
scholar Elaine Kamarck argues that "successful presidential
leadership occurs when the president is able to put together and
balance three sets of skills: policy, communication, and
implementation."
“The
obsession with communication — presidential talking and messaging —
is a dangerous mirage of the media age, a delusion that inevitably
comes crashing down in the face of government failure.”
Part
of Kamarck’s argument is that presidential primaries used to be
decided in the proverbial smoke-filled room — a room filled with
political elites who knew the candidates personally, who had worked
with them professionally, who had some sense of how they governed.
It tested “the ability of one politician to form a coalition of
equals in power.”
Hillary
Clinton won the Democratic nomination by forming a coalition. And
part of how she forms coalitions is by listening to her potential
partners — both to figure out what they need and to build her
relationships with them. This is not a skill all politicians possess.
FOUR
As
I began to press the people I talked to about why they
brought up Clinton’s listening skills, a torrent of complaints
about other politicians emerged. “The reason so many people comment
on this is most of us have experienced working with people who are
awful listeners,” says Sara Rosenbaum, who worked with Clinton on
the 1994 health reform bill and is now at George Washington
University. “Because they don’t listen, they can’t ask good
questions. They can’t absorb the information you’ve given them.”
This,
I heard again and again, is where Clinton excels. “In terms of a
president’s work, when crises come, you better have good staff
around and be able to listen and understand them,” say Mickey
Kantor, who chaired Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign but has known
Hillary Clinton since the 1970s. “Not just hear the words people
are saying but really hear what the implications are. That’s where
she’s good. In fact, she’s better than anyone I’ve ever worked
with.”
...People in
Washington do not expect those in power to be particularly attentive
to their work or curious about their past, and Clinton uses this to
her advantage. “You hear people say, ‘She’s so different in
person,’” says Podesta. “That’s what they’re finding so
appealing. When people don’t know her well and they encounter her,
people are taken with the fact that she is interested in them.
It’s fair
to ask what all this amounts to. It’s nice for staff to feel loved,
but politics, as Clinton never tires of reminding audiences, is about
getting real things done for real people.
(^^^ Examples can be found in full article.)
Two
things spring from this pattern. The first is change. Clinton is good
at getting things done. The second is relationships.
FIVE
“A lot of
governing is the slow, hard boring of hard boards,” she says. “I
don’t think there's anything sexy, exciting, or headline-grabbing
about it. I think it is getting up every day, building the
relationships, finding whatever sliver of common ground you can
occupy, never, ever giving up in continuing to reach out even to
people who are sworn political partisan adversaries.”
This
theory would be easy to dismiss except for the fact that Clinton,
well, did it. When she entered the Senate, she was two years removed
from the impeachment of her husband, and she wasn’t facing a warm
welcome.
This
wasn’t an accident, and it definitely wasn’t an inevitability.
“When she hired me, she said, ‘There is nobody I won’t work
with,’” recalls a former Clinton staffer. “I didn’t believe
it. So many of the people in the Senate had voted to impeach her
husband. But it was true. There was no one she wouldn’t work with.”
To go back
to Tannen’s theory of rapport communication versus status
communication, Clinton takes interactions that past foes expect to be
the continuation of a bitter, long-running status conflict and turns
them into an opportunity to build rapport. It is, according to those
who have witnessed it, incredibly disarming.
If Clinton
occupies the White House, Republicans will spend every waking moment
working to recapture it — and that will mean jacking up Clinton’s
negatives, reminding voters she’s a polarizing symbol of America’s
toxic politics, denying her major bipartisan victories.
But
Clinton will try, and there may even be moments when she succeeds. No
one will ever accuse her of not having Mitch McConnell over for
enough drinks. He may even like having a drink with her. He’ll
probably find she’s a pretty good listener.
You can read the full story here
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