Who will be ready for the presidency on Day One? Who is best qualified to be commander in chief? Who is tough enough, charismatic enough and competent enough to do the job?
These are all important questions, of course, but they ignore a crucial element of presidential leadership -- the ability to educate the public about the preeminent issues of the day.
Our greatest presidents, in the judgment of historians and in popular memory -- including Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt -- would never have succeeded as commanders in chief had they not first succeeded as teachers in chief. And two of the most conspicuous presidential failures in recent history -- Bill Clinton's healthcare reform plan and George W. Bush's open-ended war in Iraq -- can be traced, in part, to the inability or unwillingness of both men to educate the public about complex, long-term issues.
The duty of the president as public educator is not only more important than ever but, paradoxically, more difficult to carry out today than it was at a time when the attention of Americans was not fragmented by continuous access to infotainment. No 21st century president can count on what Roosevelt could -- an audience of at least three-quarters of the American public every time he took to the radio for one of his "fireside chats." And none of the 2008 presidential candidates is equipped with the experience of educating the public that Lincoln acquired during the famous debates he conducted about slavery with Stephen Douglas in the 1858 Illinois senatorial campaign.
Lincoln's debates (he lost the senatorial battle to Douglas) prefigured all of the major issues of the 1860 presidential campaign and the Civil War. Each of the seven debates lasted more than three hours and was attended not only by Illinois residents but by thousands of voters from neighboring states. Needless to say, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, in which each man spoke directly and at length to the other's arguments, bore no resemblance to our modern choreographed-for-television pseudo-debates, in which candidates are often forbidden to speak to each other directly and rarely give more than 90-second answers to questions. After the Lincoln-Douglas debates, millions of Americans eventually read the full text in their local newspapers or in a collection edited by Lincoln himself.
