Second-Term Inaugural Addresses of American Presidents: Of Transformational or Static Leadership?

According to a piece in the National Review, “George Washington might have had the right idea. Second inaugural addresses should be short and to the point. Of course, speaking only 135 words as Washington did in 1793 might be a little severe.”[1] Consider how short, and (yet?) so momentous Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was. The challenge for second-term-presidents, whether Barack Obama or the sixteen two-term presidents before him, is “how to make a second inaugural address sound fresh, meaningful and forward-looking." Almost all of Obama’s predecessors failed at this. Only Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt made history with their addresses. One stirred a nation riven by civil war; the other inspired a country roiled by a deep depression. All but forgotten are the 14 other addresses, their words having been unable to survive the test of time. Even those presidents famed for their past oratory fell short.”[2] This is a particularly interesting observation: surviving the test of time being the decisive criterion. Even a president whose silver tongue mesmerizes a people of his or her time may not deliver ideas that survive beyond being a cultural artifact of the president’s own time. What of an address that is quite meaningful in its immediate time yet does not pass the test of time so as to be recognized as a classic? 

A treatise becomes a classic only after it has gone beyond its own epoch because the ideas are not only cultural artifacts of the writer’s own world. Put another way, a scholar can never know whether his or her treatise will endure through the ages. The objective of a scholar can be said to commit ideas to writing that contain something more than the cultural artifacts that by definition are limited to their source-epoch. High public officials, whether of states or unions thereof, may proffer very sweet vocal wine and yet the taste goes out of fashion as soon as the culture changes.  In terms of inaugural addresses, the enduring message must place the consternation of the day in a bigger picture so as to assuage anxiety and angst. This is easier said than done.

According to the National Review, “(a) surprisingly bitter Thomas Jefferson could not match his great first inaugural; an unusually wordy Ronald Reagan could not live up to his ‘Great Communicator’ sobriquet; a decidedly humble Bill Clinton could not rise to the occasion. While most reelected presidents cannot resist the temptation to use their speeches to look back on the past four years, Lincoln had little choice but to look forward.”[3] His genius was to do so by placing the past war in perspective, citing a higher purpose. His way forward was healing and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance. To make the United States truly united once again meant more than merely getting the confederate states back. The healing and reconciliation Lincoln sought had to have a solid foundation, or they would have been dismissed as mere rhetoric by an audience otherwise bent on retribution and profit-taking at the Southerners’ expense.

I’m not sure that being forward looking is requisite, however. The key could be the inclusion of ideas that put something major at the time of the address into perspective by drawing on higher principles. Ultimately, it is the latter that transcend particular times and cultures. Moreover, people thirst for the invocation of higher principles, as most of our quotidian lives are too operational or procedural for such connections. Connecting the dots to ideas that are relatively enduring—meaning and value transcending the contours of the daily discourse in the public square—turns out to be decisive in being able to teach ears yet unborn.  Put another way, meaning-making can transcend the speaker’s own time if the meaning incorporates more fundamental principles that those that are limited to the dominant ideology of one’s age.

The meaning-making can be static in providing meaning to the present, or dynamic in the sense that something major should change (i.e., forward-oriented). The invocation of fundamental principles suggests that the change being sought is transformative rather than merely regulatory or reforming. 

Transformational leadership can be defined as meaning-making that draws on values and principles whose vitality and validity extend beyond the leader’s own epoch and is oriented to fundamental change. The meaning provided is not applied merely to the status quo. That is, if a second-term president wants to continue to lead, he or she can make sense of the present in terms of values and principles that transcend the age. This is static leadership. 

The leadership can be transformational if the meaning also pertains to a transformed vision for the society, rather than merely making sense out of the present. The objective here is to move the society from the present to a desired condition in the future by invoking principles that have meaning in both conditions. Although the condition being sought is typically in the same epoch, the principles drawn on are more solid if they have validity and value in other epochs too, thus being more than cultural artifacts of the leader’s own age. 

I suspect that few second-term U.S. presidents have been transformational leaders after a few years into their presidencies. Put another way, even the presidents who sounded amazing may be found after the fact to have suffered from a want of ideas that have value even in the upcoming world not yet born. Whereas sweet candy today might give one a sugar-high, to survive the rigors of time better nourishment is necessary. In the context of inaugural addresses, the nourishment being sought is in the form of fundamental ideas whose value transcends the age and yet can explain the present and possibly an alternative in the age that is transformational in nature.

1. George E. Condon, Jr., “The Second-Term Inaugural Jinx,” National Journal, January 20, 2013.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

The First Multiracial U.S. President: Leadership as Personified Symbol over Political Advantage

Barak Obama had a tendency to modify his manner of speaking, and even his dialect, to fit with his audience. Listening to his speech to the National Urban League, I was stunned; early on, he pivoted off from his ordinary manner of speaking to speak in what was surely a more familiar way to much of his audience. The crowd loved it. The audience must have been looking at him as the first black US President. It occurred to me while listening to him and observing his strategy to connect to his audience that although there would be less political advantage in it, he could have run for president by presenting himself as multi-racial (technically, mulatto). To be sure, there were fewer multi-racial Americans who would have identified with him, but is that even the point? The multi-racial segment of the US population was small, but growing.  It already pointed to what most states would likely look like in fifty or a hundred years from 2010, when I heard the first multi-racial US President speak. Were he to have made explicit his multi-racial identity, he would have personified the leading edge of what America would become, and thus have served innately as a leader in his very person.  That is to say, he would have led through his person—as a symbol personified—as the a sign of things to come, transcending “black vs. white.”  Nature’s integration was already beginning make a dent in the artificial problem of racism far more than any government program or even a US President could, yet had Obama making the meaning of his symbol explicit would have helped Americans to know the transition already occurring in  their midst. Instead, he used his "Black identity" to solidify his base for political advantage.

Perhaps it is the tacit duplicity in a multiracial man permitting himself to be labeled as black for political expediency that lies at the core of why some people did not trust him (e.g., the “birthers”).  Such duplicity is like a subterranean fault-line undergirding the tension between campaigning for real change and then stocking people of the old guard, such as Larry Summers, in his administration.  The duplicity of promising systemic change then dropping his insistence on a public option and no mandate for health coverage—essentially guaranteeing a new mass market to the same health insurance companies that actively purged people with pre-existing conditions—resonated in the multi-racial man using the term “black” to identify himself publicly.  Barak Obama is as much white as he is black.  Were he to “run with this,” he would have instantiated a leader on the forefront, the  cutting edge of society, even though there was little political capital to be made on it.  

As an explicit multi-racial symbol, President Obama could have shown the world where America was headed, and that Americans were facing that future with heads held high, or at least with awareness. While perhaps not helpful in elections, such a function, which can only be done by the US President, was at the time sorely needed, given America’s image abroad. America was finally becoming the melting pot that had been proclaimed for so long—finally getting past the need for duplicity.  President Obama could have symbolized this in his person, and thus have done America a service far more valuable than any partisan legislation.

Transforming Transformational Leadership: Foundations over Ideology

James Burn’s concept of transformational leadership is in essence a process in which “one or more persons engage with others in such a way that leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality.”[1] This includes a moral commitment to develop followers, especially morally. To Burns, transformational leadership is therefore “an ethical, moral enterprise.”[2] I contend that the term transformation is not inherently ethical, and so it can apply to leadership in an amoral sense. Freed up from the limitations of being viewed primarily or even exclusively as moral, transformation can be seen to apply to leadership in at least two, much more direct—or central—ways than morally: as referring to a leader’s own transformation and to a leader’s vision being transformational. 

The entire essay is in The Essence of Leadership. 

---

[1] James M. Burns, J. Leadership (New York: Harper & Row, 1978): 20.

[2] Ken W. Parry and Sarah B. Proctor-Thomson, “Perceived Integrity of Transformational Leaders in Organizational Settings,” Journal of Business Ethics 35, no. 2 (January, 2002): 75.