John Edwards: Transformational Leadership

Eric Rauchway has a great article up on The New Republic about how Democrats can -- and Edwards already does -- address issues on their own terms, rather than according to the narrow confines they're given.

A crisis like the current credit crunch presents a political leader with a range of options. One can say that the banks, backstopped by the Federal Reserve, will sort things out--which with minor modifications remains the president's position. One can go further and note that the imbroglio in which markets now have us immersed results from a lack of regulation, and that reforms will prevent the problem from recurring--which was the position Barack Obama took in a Financial Times op-ed last week. Or a leader can go further still and urge us to ask whether the system that got us here truly reflects our values. Of all the Democratic presidential candidates, John Edwards is the one taking this approach, examining the gap between our core values and our actual practices.

According to a recent Time profile of Edwards, his advisor Joe Trippi tells reporters Edwards is running a "transformational" rather than a "transactional" campaign.

Citing James MacGregor Burns's 1978 classic Leadership, Trippi contrasts the "transactional" approach of other Democrats, which seek to offer minor modifications to the status quo, with the more ambitious aim of transforming our approach entirely.

Burns's transformational leader recognizes "that, whatever the separate interests persons might hold, they are presently or potentially united in the pursuit of 'higher' goals." This is the point of Edwards's "One America" trope. By drawing a distinction between "resigning ourselves to Two Americas or fighting for the One America we all believe in," he's drawing as explicit a distinction between transactional leadership and transformational leadership as a candidate can, saying we can accept what we have and fix it at the margins, or try for what we really want.

Edwards sees this as the true role of a leader in a democracy:

not selling a product to the public, but letting the public see plainly what it really wants. Edwards has organized his whole campaign around this principle. Betting that the current crisis--not just the credit debacle, but the mess in which the country finds itself at home and abroad, the unending legacy of Katrina and Iraq--amounts to a true opportunity for transformational leadership, he's trying to shift the debate away from procedure and toward ultimate goals. And it's a good bet to take. As in the civil rights era, we've reached a point where it will take more than a technical fix to right the system. Like Johnson, though, he's still going to need calculation, patience, and the cooperation of events if he wants Americans to agree.

Edwards is certainly the leader with ideas that are proportional to the challenges we face. Hopefully he can sell his vision to the voters -- because the Party leadership clearly can't think in these terms.