News Journal: Weaker leaders, stronger followers mean more trouble

The cure for gridlock in Washington is stronger leadership. Obama isn’t leading. Boehner is a weak Speaker who can’t control his caucus. Reid, McConnell and Pelosi are ineffective.

That’s the conventional wisdom, but I beg to differ. We can change the names of our leaders, but until we shake up the system as it exists today we will never have the kind of effective leadership we had in the past.

When I first went to work in the Senate back in the 1970s, leaders there and in the House could effectively negotiate with each other and the While House because they knew they had the support of the members of their respective caucuses. When Speaker Tip O’Neil and President Reagan reached a compromise agreement on a piece of legislation, they could close the deal.

The fact that congressional leaders controlled what we rightfully ended up calling “earmarks” was a factor. If a representative wanted that new federally funded bridge in his district, he was less likely to buck his party’s leadership.

Most congressional districts and states were competitive. Candidates tended to moderate their positions to ensure the widest possible support. They also relied heavily on their national parties for campaign funding.

Both parties included members from across the political spectrum. Republicans Jake Javits, from New York, and Clifford Case, from New Jersey, were among the most liberal members of the Senate. Democrats James Eastland, from Mississippi, and Herman Talmadge, from Georgia, were two of the most conservative.

What’s changed? Just about everything. We did the right thing by ending wasteful earmark funding, but it took some power away from leaders. Campaign funding from national parties is far less important to most members now that they have direct access to all kinds of special interest money.

Perhaps most important of all, there are now very few congressional districts and even states that are truly competitive politically. With the recent defeat of Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Mark Pryor of Arkansas, there are no longer any Democratic senators in the Old South. And the current chances of a Republican senator from California, New York or Maryland are very slim. Instead of the ideologically diverse parties we once had, we now have a Senate in which every Republican member is more conservative than any Democratic member. Every Democrat is more liberal than any Republican.

This is simply a reflection of what has happened in most of our states and congressional districts. Charlie Cook pointed out a couple of years ago that increasingly Americans are “self-sorting,” choosing to live in neighborhoods of culturally and politically like-minded people. Try to find a Whole Foods super market and a Cracker Barrel restaurant in the same congressional district.

When you are elected from a state or district that overwhelmingly and consistently votes for your party you don’t have to worry about attracting other voters in the next election. And if you have to choose between the don’t-compromise voters who elected you and your please-compromise leaders, you will nearly always side with your voters.

Where does that leave leadership? Barbara Kellerman is the McGregor Burns Lecturer in Public Leadership at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and was ranked by Forbes among the top 50 business thinkers in the country. If there is an expert in the field, she is it. In her new book, The End Of Leadership, she makes the case that our leadership problems go far beyond Washington, D.C. She says “leaders of every stripe are in disrepute; that the tireless and often superficial teaching of leadership has brought us no closer to nirvana; and that followers nearly everywhere have become, on one hand, disappointed and disillusioned, and on the other hand entitled and emboldened.”

Her book traces how “leadership and followership have changed over time, especially in the last 40 years. As a result of cultural evolution and technological revolution, the balance of power between leaders and followers has shifted – with leaders becoming weaker and followers stronger.”

Kellerman believes the leadership/followership problem affects every area of our society, which reinforces my own belief that problems in Washington nearly always mirror many of the same problems in the country at large. People who are “disappointed and disillusioned” with their leaders and at the same time feel “entitled and emboldened” make up a perfect recipe for continued gridlock.

The 2016 campaigns are already starting, and we will spend the next year-and-a-half debating the hot-button issues of day. We will end up rearranging our leaders, but to make them more effective we need another important debate, one that confronts and changes the complex systemic reasons for gridlock.

Ted Kaufman is a former U.S. Senator from Delaware.