by Tim Storey
"When you are truly exercising leadership, you are threatening to people and you challenge their assumptions--that's why the work of a leader is so hard. Leadership is about disappointing your own supporters at a rate that they can absorb to make progress on the hardest problems." That is the advice that top legislative leaders heard from Marty Linsky, a professor from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and a former legislative minority leader himself.
NCSL is hosting a meeting in California this weekend attended by top legislative leaders and legislative appropriations chairs to discuss emerging issues, economic trends and the challenges of exercising leadership.
Innumerable interesting nuggets have poured out during the conversations between participants and faculty. Former White House Chief of Staff and OMB Director Leon Panetta kicked off the program with a warning that he believes that the frustration level of the public is at a high level. Panetta said, "It's a challenging time and if all we're doing is playing
partisan games then the public is going to take it out on incumbents." Panetta, who remains very involved in public policy having recently served on the Iraq Study Group, bemoaned the intensity of partisanship in Washington saying that "in 30 years, I've never seen Washington as partisan as it is today."
Atlantic media journalist Ron Brownstein echoed that theme of hyperpartisanship when talking about his new book where he documents the waves of partisanship that have ebbed and flowed throughout U.S. political history. "The cost of hyperpartisanship is tangible and profound. We are unable to make progress on the concerns and issues of the American people." warned Brownstein.
The economy also is posing major challenges to legislative leaders headed into 2008 sessions according to Standard & Poors Chief Economist David Wyss; however, Wyss said that the economy will be fine IF nothing else goes wrong. His "bottom-line" was that the economy is already starting to recover but slowly. Interestingly, the first three questions posed to Wyss by legislative leaders were on 1. Immigration, 2. health care costs and 3. pension liability and the fiscal implications of the retirement of baby boomers. Those questions track closely to a list of top issues that NCSL's Executive Director Bill Pound shared with the group-- a bit of a preview of NCSL's upcoming webinar on the top 10 legislative issues for 2008. Bill said that 2008 would be a particularly challenging year given how tough the issues are and that making progress will be further complicated by limited budgets and election year politics.
Linsky ended with a call for the leaders to "take risks to exercise real leadership" on behalf of the values that they believe in. He also reminded the group of John F. Kennedy's book Profiles in Courage about U.S. Senators who took tough positions for the good of the country, yet he cautioned that of the eight Senators profiled, seven lost their bids for reelection and the other lost in a bid for the White House. Leadership isn't easy.
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