Leadership and Follow Through
Maintaining trust is the first characteristic of effective leadership. Early this year President Bush gave a terrific State of the Union Speech. He gave an excellent review– I cheered through most of it. But. CQ ran a story the about the State of the Union with a graphical illustration of the number of times the President mentioned certain issues. (Subscription required — it’s on page 25.)
Tony Perkins, President of the Family Research Council, had an interesting suggestion: add social issues to the graph; let’s see what happens.
The result was incredible. The graph you see above powerfully illustrates empirically, exactly what many of us felt after watching the speech.
Click on the image for Tony’s comments — thanks to Andy McDonald for the graphic and Dawn Marie Powers for the research. Cross-posted from FRCBlog.com.
The ‘values voter’ didn’t get much attention back then. The ‘values voter’ is being ignored today. The Bush personnel policy that pushes Democrat-donating-liberals into substantial positions, such as Andrew von Eschenbach and Janet Neff would not help future get-out-the-vote strategies.
No one would question George Bush’s leadership integrity. However, it might be helpful to acknowledge the customers who bought the conservative agenda of Bush.
Full Disclosure: The wife of Your Business Blogger, Charmaine, is Vice President of Communications at the Family Research Council.
Cross Post from Reasoned Audacity.
Inasmuch as I don’t think Bush has any integrity to speak of, I am precluded from questioning it.
Why?
The US political situation is, for all practical purposes, a two-party system. Bush knows perfectly well that the values-voters will vote for him, because the alternatives – either vote democrat or dont vote – both benefit the democrats to some extent. He *cant* lose the support of values voters in the polls, but if he tries to appeal strongly to them he will lose the support of moderates.